Alphabet Soup: Moving Beyond Acronyms

If you’ve never worked with a web design company before, on first meeting them you may hear a dizzying array of terminology and acronyms. The designer isn’t trying to impress you with jargon, they’re just speaking the language of the industry. It is extremely helpful if the client has some idea of what the designer is talking about, as both can communicate more clearly. Here are some frequently used terms in web design.

backlinks
Backlinks are links from other websites to your own. On blogs they may be called trackbacks. Backlinks play a huge part in search rankings, as the more sites that link to yours, the more important your site is deemed to be by search engines.

breadcrumbs
Breadcrumbs (or the breadcrumb trail) are the small, text-based navigation usually found at the top of the content area but below the main navigation. They are used as an aid in helping users see where they are in a website as they drill down through the pages. For example, on a hardware store site you may see “Home > Products > Lawn & Garden > Fertilizer,” as the user moves from the general to the specific.

domain
The domain is the name that identifies a particular website. These domain names represent IP (internet protocol) addresses, which are individual numbers assigned to every website on the internet to differentiate one from another. These IP addresses are translated into domain names so that humans can more easily find and remember them.

font
A font is the same as a typeface, just like the fonts listed in your word processing software. Fonts are trickier on the web than in print, because individual computers and web browsers will display the same font differently. There are certain fonts that are designated as web-safe as they remain essentially the same across all platforms.

impression
Impressions are the number of times an advertisement on a site has been loaded. Advertisers often pay for ad placement based on the number of impressions that ad will receive. Once a set number of impressions is reached, that ad is no longer displayed, as is the case with Google AdWords.