Accessible websites are those that take into account impaired abilities to access the features of the website.

It could be taking into account the use of screen readers, ensuring colours are not inaccessible for those who are colour-blind or ensuring that any information delivered by audio is alos available in written form.

All GTWO produced websites are automatically optimised for accessibility!

Algorithms are mathematical formulas that compute various scenarios and outcomes and provide certain results and outcomes on the basis of their computation.

Famous algorithms include those used by Google to decide where a website should rank for certain search terms – does the website deserve to be on page one or page one hundred and one?

The algorithm details are a closely-guarded secret, but trying to guess what’s important and makes a key difference has generated a multi-billion dollar SEO industry!

This is one of many terms that is used to mean a few different things.

A customer avatar means the profile of the ideal person you are trying to reach in your business.

A website avatar can also be used to describe the representation of you within a digital environment.

This could be as simple as the picture that accompanies a comment you make on a forum, through to the virtual ‘you’ playing in multi-player video games. 

Another one with two possible explanations.

In web development terms, back end development normally means the core building block code of a website.

In web design terms, the back end is usually the administration panel of a website that most website owners will be aware of.

This refers to some shady practices employed by people who want to try to artificially increase their ranking in Google.

A few years ago this was a relatively ‘easy’ practice to use, but Google (and it’s algorithms!) are wise to the ways of the black hatter …

Pretty much the original way most people started with a website, a blog is a collection of posts that are contained on the same website.

There are blogs on specific subjects, random subjects and some with different authors every time.

Blogging has been somewhat superceded by ‘vlogging’, which is the same principle of sharing thoughts, ideas and opinions, except on video rather than a written article.

This is the navigation trail that shows how you have arrived at a specific website post or page.

Good navigation design should negate the need for a breadcrumb trail to be shown, but sometimes they can be a handy tool.

GTWO doesn’t use them as everything can be reached within a maximum of two clicks.

This is the ‘window’ you use to search for website addresses (URLs). Most popular ones include Chrome, Safari, Firefox and Opera, although some people (for no sensible reason that I can fathom) also like Edge.

Browsers are separate to search engines (so Google Chrome is a browser, whereas Google is a search engine).

These are used with pages and posts on a website to group them together.

If needed, it makes it easier for the website to then show only those posts or pages that belong to a particular category.

This can be useful for if you only want to show people certain bits of information depending on what they’re looking for.

This refers to any action that takes place on the local computer in order to deliver a particular piece of website functionality.

For example, the cache is client-based, as it’s held on a local computer for quick retrieval.

Your computer is the ‘client’, whereas a website is held on a separate machine known as a ‘server’ (as in it ‘serves’ the information to you such as what the website looks like).

This is a type of computer language that governs how something looks on a web page – what colour, size and font type any text is for example.

CSS is usually used in conjunction with HTML and Javascript to create most websites you look at.

CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets.

This stands for Domain Name Server (or system or service) which is the technology that converts a domain name into an IP address and vice versa.

It means that computers and humans can talk to each other!

It exists to allow humans to search for human-friendly domain names and computers to understand what we’re looking for. 

Your domain, or domain name, is the human-friendly address of your website! It is one part of the entire URL that identifies individual websites.

Your computer uses the URL to know what to look for, where to look and how to load a website – but the information it needs to do this is not very human-friendly, so domain names exist to make life easier for us!

This is a service that uses cookies to record a specific avatar for someone and then uses that information across several websites.

If you have set up a gravatar, it can save time inputting a profile into every website you interact with.

The flip side is that you need to enable cookies to remember and access this information, so if you’re not a fan of being tracked across the internet, it might not be for you!

This is shorthand for ‘hexadecimal’ and is the numbering system used to identify colours online.

There are always six characters in a hex number, which can be any combination of numbers 0-9 or letters A-F.

Hex numbers are usually preceded by a hashtag #

The combination of characters is actually three sets of a pair each, representing the red, green and blue settings of a colour screen.

White is #FFFFFFFFFFFF

Black is: #000000

This is the computer language that governs where things are placed on a website page. In combination with CSS, it is responsible for the overall look of a website.

HTML stands for Hypertext Markup Language.

http (hypertext transfer protocol) and https (hypertext transfer protocol secure or hypertext transfer protocol delivered through a Secure Socket layer (SSL)) are the set of rules that govern requests from a web browser to a web server i.e. the web browser says “I’d like to visit this website page please” and the web server says “Of course – here you go”. (They’re very polite you know.)

All websites served through Google (and by extension Google Chrome) are required to have the secure version or risk being marked as an ‘unsafe’ website.

The security layer (which is delivered by SSL) adds extra encryption to any data submitted through the website, which minimises the risk of this information being hijacked and used by people with shady intentions!

All GTWO hosting packages and websites offer free security certificates to ensure https is usable.

Any text that includes a hyperlink!

Standard email protocol (or rule) that allows emails to be accessed. Emails are not downloaded (as with POP), so they stay on a central server, allowing you to access the same email from different devices.

IMAP stands for Internet Message Access Protocol.

ISP (or Internet Service Provider) is the company that gives you access to the internet in the first place.

Typically you will get your internet broadband access through BT, Virgin or Sky in the UK. Increasingly mobile network providers are offering this service and there are a number of smaller operations that do it to. 

I use Zen Internet for my fibre optic broadband supply and very good they are too!

Javascript creates and controls dynamic website content i.e. if it moves on the web page it’s probably javascript that’s responsible!

Javascript also controls things like autocompletion of forms.

When you first accessed this website page, you may have noticed the images for each blog post at the top of the page seemed to ‘slide’ into place. Javascript did that.

It works in conjunction with HTML and CSS to make a website look and feel the way it does.

This is any page that a viewer ‘lands on’ from a direct link.

For example, if I were to place this link on another website “https://getthatwebsiteonline/learn-stuff/”, anyone clicking on the link would land on the page you’re reading right now – this would be the landing page.

The term is commonly used for sales pages of websites.

Information (data information) that provides information about other data.

It’s the explanation behind the explanation!

On a website, metadata isn’t normally visible to viewers, but it’s needed to make sure the computer can read and show everything it needs to.

There are different types of metadata describing different attributes of a website page.

Shorthand for ‘navigation’, this is usually in reference to the nav bar of a website (the place that has all the links to the other pages – usually at the top of a website page).

You will most likely have seen this when the text you’re looking at hasn’t rendered properly!

It’s a piece of HTML code that tells the web page to add in a space, but to not make it a line break.

It looks like this (without the spaces – if I type it in exactly, it will just show a blank space!):

& n b s p ; 

A single view of information on a website that can be seen without having to link somewhere different. 

Theoretically a page can be any length (although I suspect even the most ardent fan would give up after a while!).

The permanent link of a post or a page on a website.

The permalink is important at it always provides the address of a page or post, even when that page or post is no longer linked to by other means.

An individual point of colour on a computer monitor.

The more pixels on a screen, the higher the resolution and clarity of what’s shown.

A platform is the foundation on which a website is built.

Different platforms offer different functionality, with WordPress being one of the most popular and most versatile (which is why it’s the one I exclusively use!).

POP is ‘Post Office Protocol’ that fetches email from a server and downloads it to a local device.

The biggest problem with POP is that it downloads the email, so it’s only accessible on the device it’s downloaded to.

This wasn’t a problem before smartphones and tablets, but now the technology is outdated and most emails are served through IMAP.

When a specific action is performed by a visitor to a website, it can trigger a pop up – a dynamic box of information (such as a newsletter sign up) that is designed to stop the visitor in their tracks and do something (that’s important to the website owner).

While most people will report to be annoyed about pop ups, they work …

The number of pixels contained on a monitor – the higher the number, the higher the resolution and the more clarity that can be shown especially with images.

This refers to whether or not a website is able to change it’s layout depending on the device it’s being viewed on. 

Clearly the layout that looks best on a computer monitor is not going to work for a mobile phone, so the website needs to be responsive to the device.

All GTWO websites are responsive by default.

Another term for computer code. A ‘piece of script’ is usually a set of code that can carry out a specific function.

The process of accessing all the information on a single website page or post. You scroll down to keep reading and scroll back up to go to the beginning.

SEO (or Search Engine Optimisation) is the term used to describe how well a website has been designed in order to make it rank higher in search engine results.

There are other terms thrown around with this one – notably ‘black hat’ and ‘white hat’ strategies, which refer to above board (white) and less than ethical (black) techniques employed by techie folk.

All GTWO websites come as white hat optimised, but the tweaks made to a website are not the entire reason a site ranks well or not.

Again another one for Google (and I’d recommend searching for Backlinko)!

This refers to any processing that is done by the hardware that contains all the website files – the server.

The SSL or Secure Socket Layer is additional encryption applied to a website to make it more difficult for unauthorised people (or computers) to read the information on it.

Having an SSL security certificate means a website is displayed as https instead of just http and will be displayed as ‘safe’ by Google in a search.

This is a ‘subset’ website of a main website, which can contain information or functionality not delivered by the main website.

For example, in order to access the domain search, hosting booking and service booking on this website, you are directed to the subdomain https://cp.getthatwebsiteonline.com 

It allows additional functionality to be added to a website without slowing the main site down for visitors.

Similar to categories, tags can be used to specifically classify the content of a page or post in more detail.

Where a category describes the overall grouping of a post or page, and only one would be used for each, several tags can be used for each, allowing a more detailed search and serve of information to be performed.

A website theme is the basic template used to build up the layout, look and feel.

While it is possible to build a website without using any template, they can make life a lot easier!

Some themes don’t allow much change to them other than very basic colour scheme choices and font choices.

Other themes allow huge amounts of stylisation to create unique and individual websites.

An example of the latter is the theme DIVI, which is what I use for all my websites (including all GTWO ones). 

This stands for User Interface and essentially just means the look and feel of a website. 

That’s not to diminish the importance of this aspect of web design of course!

The URL (or Uniform Resource Locator) of a web page is the full, computer-friendly address of a particular web page, as distinct from the domain name (which is the human-friendly version).

The domain name of this website is GetThatWebsiteOnline.com and every page in the website starts with this (and also https://), but whenever you see something in the address bar of your browser that looks like a mostly unintelligible string of characters, letters and numbers, that’s a URL!

This is the hardware that stores the original files that together mean your website works.

The capacity of a web server is limited and so if too many website files are stored, it can slow down every site that is held there.

This is often a problem with exceptionally cheap hosting solutions (and some expensive ones), where the providers cram as many sites as they can on to one server and hope they don’t get too much traffic.

GTWO sells hosting that is ‘load balanced’ which means no one server is ever over-loaded, so your site will never be affected by another site’s greediness with bandwidth!

Very basic website building platform that can’t really compete with WordPress.

Another very basic website building platform. While this may be initially attractive as an offering, the lack of portability means that if you ever wanted to move to WordPress, you would have to build again from scratch.

The most popular and flexible website building platform in the world.

Also the platform I use exclusively (so please don’t ask me to help with anything else!).