Terms and abbreviations every website owner needs to know.

Sometimes the jargon and all the technical terms can be quite confusing. If someone told you to click on the hamburger menu, you’d probably stare at them dumbfounded. Worry not.

Today we are going to talk about all the terms and abbreviations that every website owner needs to know.

If you are a website owner or anybody curious about all the terms your designer friend threw at you, read along.

Let’s begin with the very basics.

HTTP/HTTPS

Hypertext Transfer Protocol/ Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure, an abbreviation we are all familiar with. When you search for something on a browser, your browser sends a request to the webserver looking for results. More like sending a search party(HTTP) looking for something you want to find. HTTPS is a more secure version of this. When the webserver finds the result it transfers it to your browser. If it is not found, then your search party will come back with 404, which leads us to the next term. Secure Socket Layer(SSL) is the new industry standard and with the latest updates for Google, it is practically impossible for a website to look good without SSL.

404 Page Not Found

When you browse for a page that does not exist, a page containing the message 404 Page Not Found will be shown to you. For instance, somebody searches for “yourwebsitename.com/whatever” and a page called “whatever” doesn’t exist, a message with 404 will be displayed. Website owners can use this to redirect the users to relevant pages.

CSS

Cascading Style Sheets is a mechanism that is used in HTML to add various styles to your website. Using CSS, fonts, colors, and spacing of the content can be styled in a web document. Next time you look through a website and find something pretty, you can tell your friends that it is done using Cascading Style Sheets.

HTML

Hypertext Markup Language is a language understood by a computer, used to create web documents that will be accessible through the web browser. The basic coding of HTML is pretty simple, but to create a well-made web page using HTML with the help of CSS and other codes require expert knowledge.

CTA

Call to Action is a stimulus that the audience can use to act. A clickable URL, that will take the audience to the next step is called a CTA. Like the name implies it calls the browser for the next action.

Hamburger Menu

It is not what you’re thinking. Haven’t you seen that three lines stacked on one another at the side of a website? You click on this and all the options pop out. Yep, it’s not called three lines on the left side. It’s called the hamburger menu or hamburger icon. Now that you think of it doesn’t it look just like a hamburger?

Breadcrumb Navigation

When you visit a website and click on a CTA in it and are taken to a completely different world inside the website, you might start getting dizzy about where you are. Breadcrumb navigation is a graphical control element that helps you navigate easily inside a website.

Landing Page

A landing page is where you land by clicking on a search engine optimized search result or the link you clicked on from a promotional email you received. This is usually a single web page.

If you are not sure, you can get a review by experts at The Dreamer Designs.

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