Plain words for the jargon.
Every trade has its shorthand, and ours is worse than most. If somebody has used one of these at you without explaining it, here is what they meant.
Brand
- Brand identity
- The whole visual system a business is recognised by — mark, colours, type, imagery and the rules for using them. Bigger than a logo, which is one piece of it.
- Wordmark
- A logo made from the business name set in type, rather than a separate symbol. Most small businesses are better served by one than by an abstract icon nobody will learn.
- Type system
- The set of typefaces, sizes and weights a brand uses, and the rules for when each applies. It is what stops a site looking like six people made it.
- Style guide
- The document that records all of the above so a future designer, printer or employee does not have to guess.
- Mockup
- A realistic picture of a finished design — what it will look like, not how it will work.
- Wireframe
- A deliberately plain layout showing what goes where and in what order, before anyone argues about colour.
The web, generally
- Domain
- The address people type, like haswellcreative.com. You rent it annually from a registrar; it is not the same thing as your hosting.
- DNS
- The lookup system that turns your domain into the address of the server holding your site. When a site goes down after a move, DNS is usually why.
- Hosting
- The computer your website actually lives on, and the service that keeps it running.
- SSL / TLS
- The encryption behind the padlock in the address bar. Without it browsers mark your site “not secure”, which costs you customers before they read a word.
- CMS
- Content management system — the admin area that lets you change text and images without a developer. WordPress is one.
- Responsive
- A site that reshapes itself to fit a phone, tablet or desktop rather than shrinking one layout down.
- Breakpoint
- The screen width at which a responsive layout rearranges itself.
How sites get built
- WordPress
- The most widely used CMS. Flexible and familiar, at the cost of needing maintenance and updates.
- Divi
- A popular visual page builder for WordPress. Fast to work in; its updates occasionally disturb layouts, which is why priority support for it exists.
- Plugin
- An add-on that gives WordPress a capability it lacks — booking, forms, shops. Every plugin is also code someone has to keep patched.
- Theme
- The package controlling how a WordPress site looks. A child theme holds your customisations so a theme update does not erase them.
- Static site
- A site delivered as finished files with no database or server code. Very fast and very hard to hack, but changes need a rebuild unless content is fetched live.
- Headless
- Keeping the content in one system and rendering the website separately from it — so the same content can feed a site, an app, or several sites.
- Staging
- A private copy of your site where changes are tried before they reach the public one.
Being found and being fast
- SEO
- Search engine optimisation — the structure, speed, content and metadata that decide whether search engines can understand and rank your pages.
- Core Web Vitals
- Google’s measurements of loading speed, responsiveness and visual stability. They feed into rankings and they correlate with whether people stay.
- Metadata
- The title and description a search engine or social network shows when your page appears. Not visible on the page itself, and frequently neglected.
- Alt text
- A written description of an image, read aloud by screen readers and shown when an image fails to load. Required for accessibility; useful for search.
- Sitemap
- A machine-readable list of your pages that helps search engines find all of them.
- Favicon
- The small icon in the browser tab.
Being found by AI
- AI search
- Asking ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini or a phone assistant a question and getting an answer instead of a list of links. The answer usually names a few businesses; being one of them is the whole game.
- Answer engine
- A general name for those tools. They do not send you a ranked page of results — they decide, and cite a handful of sources.
- GEO
- Generative engine optimisation. SEO's younger sibling: shaping a site so AI models can understand it, trust it and quote it, rather than so it climbs a list of blue links.
- Structured data
- Machine-readable facts added invisibly to a page — that you are a chiropractor, in this city, open these hours, with these services at these prices. Humans never see it; models and search engines read it first.
- Schema.org
- The shared vocabulary that structured data is written in, so “opening hours” means the same thing on every site on the web.
- Semantic HTML
- Using tags for what content is — a heading, a list, an address — rather than styling everything into anonymous boxes. A model reading a semantic page understands it; a model reading a pile of divs guesses.
- Entity
- How a model recognises your business as a specific, real thing rather than a name that resembles several others. Consistent naming, address and details across the web is what builds it.
- Citation
- When a model names your business in an answer and links to you. The AI-era equivalent of ranking first, and much harder to buy.
- Crawlability
- Whether a bot can actually read your pages. A site that assembles its content in the browser may look perfect to you and arrive empty to a model.
Turning visitors into customers
- Landing page
- A single page built for one purpose, usually a campaign, with nothing on it competing for attention.
- Call to action
- The one thing you want a visitor to do next, said plainly — book, call, buy, enquire. Often abbreviated CTA.
- Conversion rate
- The share of visitors who do that thing. Doubling it is almost always cheaper than doubling your traffic.
- Lead capture
- Collecting enough detail from an interested visitor to follow up, usually a name and an email.
- Above the fold
- What is visible before anyone scrolls. Borrowed from newspapers, and still the most valuable space on the page.
- Bounce
- A visitor who arrives, looks at one page and leaves without doing anything.
Still sounds like another language?
Ask. We would rather explain something twice than have you nod along to a proposal you are not sure about.
Ask a question
or email hello@haswellcreative.com