Reference
Every term in your web proposal, explained
Agencies hide behind vocabulary. This page removes the advantage. Forty-six terms that turn up in website and app quotes, defined in plain English, with a note on what to actually watch out for.
Websites & design
- Responsive design
- A single website that rearranges itself to fit any screen size, from a phone to a widescreen monitor, instead of having a separate mobile version.
- This has been the standard since roughly 2015. If a proposal lists "mobile version" as a paid add-on, that is a signal the vendor is behind the times or padding the quote.
- See alsoMobile-firstBreakpoint
- Mobile-first
- Designing the phone layout first and the desktop layout second, because most visitors to a local business website arrive on a phone.
- For most Minnesota small businesses, nonprofits, and schools, 60 to 80 percent of traffic is mobile. Designing for desktop first and shrinking it down is how you end up with a site that technically works on a phone but is miserable to use.
- See alsoResponsive design
- Breakpoint
- A screen width at which a website changes its layout — for example, switching from one column on a phone to three columns on a laptop.
- Above the fold
- Everything a visitor sees before scrolling. A newspaper term that stuck.
- What sits above the fold decides whether people stay. For a local service business that is usually: what you do, where you do it, proof that you are real, and a phone number.
- Wireframe
- A simple grey-box sketch of a page showing what goes where, produced before any visual design work starts.
- Wireframes are where structural arguments get settled cheaply. Changing a wireframe takes ten minutes; changing a built page takes a day.
- UI and UX
- UI (user interface) is what the thing looks like. UX (user experience) is whether it works for the person using it.
- A site can have excellent UI and terrible UX: beautiful typography wrapped around a form nobody can complete on a phone.
- Accessibility (a11y)
- Designing and building so that people using screen readers, keyboard navigation, magnification, or captions can use the site as well as anyone else.
- WCAG is the standard, and WCAG 2.1 Level AA is the level most funders, school districts, and government contracts ask for. For organizations that serve people with disabilities, an inaccessible site is a credibility problem before it is a legal one.
- See alsoAlt text
- Alt text
- A short written description attached to an image, read aloud by screen readers and shown when an image fails to load.
- It also helps images appear in Google Images. "IMG_4021.jpg" tells a search engine nothing; "Front entrance of Gateway STEM Academy in Saint Paul" tells it everything.
- See alsoAccessibility (a11y)
- Favicon
- The small icon shown in a browser tab, bookmark list, and phone home screen when someone saves your site.
- Landing page
- A page built for one audience arriving from one source with one action available — usually an ad campaign or a specific search.
- Landing pages convert better than homepages because they remove choice. A homepage has to serve everybody, so it serves nobody in particular.
Building & hosting
- CMS (content management system)
- The admin area where non-technical staff log in to edit pages, post news, and swap photos without touching code. WordPress is the most common one.
- The important question is not which CMS but whether the specific people at your organization will actually use it. A powerful CMS nobody logs into is worse than a simple one somebody updates weekly.
- See alsoWordPressStatic site
- WordPress
- The most widely used content management system in the world, powering a large share of all websites. Free software, with paid hosting, themes, and plugins around it.
- Its strength is that anybody can maintain it and there is a plugin for everything. Its weakness is the same thing: plugin sprawl is the single most common cause of slow, insecure small business sites.
- See alsoCMS (content management system)Plugin
- Plugin
- An add-on that extends what a CMS can do — contact forms, galleries, booking, e-commerce.
- Every plugin is code from a stranger running on your site. Twenty-five plugins means twenty-five things that can break, slow the site down, or open a security hole. Fewer and better is the rule.
- Static site
- A website whose pages are pre-built as plain files rather than assembled by a server on every visit. Extremely fast, very cheap to host, and almost impossible to hack.
- The trade-off is that content changes go through a build step. For sites that change weekly rather than hourly, that trade is usually worth it.
- Hosting
- The service that keeps your website files on a server connected to the internet so people can reach them. Typically $10 to $50 a month for a small business site.
- Cheap shared hosting is the second most common cause of slow sites after plugin bloat. It is also where sites get hacked. This is not the line item to save $8 a month on.
- Domain name
- Your web address — the tayopro.com part. Rented annually, usually $12 to $25 a year, from a registrar such as Namecheap, Cloudflare, or GoDaddy.
- Make sure the domain is registered in your organization name with an email address you control. Domains registered under a former web designer account are one of the most common and painful problems we get called about.
- See alsoDNS
- DNS
- The system that translates your domain name into the server address where your site actually lives. It also routes your email.
- DNS is why a site launch can accidentally take down company email. It is worth asking any vendor how they plan to handle the cutover.
- SSL certificate / HTTPS
- The encryption that puts the padlock in the address bar and makes your address start with https rather than http.
- Free through Let’s Encrypt and included by every decent host. If a vendor is billing you annually for an SSL certificate on a standard site, ask why.
- Staging site
- A private copy of your website where changes are made and tested before going live.
- Any vendor editing a live site directly is one typo away from your homepage being blank during business hours.
- Backup
- A saved copy of your site files and database that can be restored if something breaks or gets hacked.
- Ask two questions: how often, and where are they stored. A backup sitting on the same server as the site is not a backup.
Search & getting found
- 301 redirect
- A permanent instruction that sends both visitors and search engines from an old URL to a new one, passing along most of the old page ranking value.
- The single most common way organizations destroy their search traffic is redesigning a site without mapping old URLs to new ones. This is a required deliverable on any rebuild, not an optional extra.
- SEO
- Search engine optimization: the work of making a site more likely to appear when people search for what you offer.
- For a local business it is mostly four things: pages that clearly name your services and locations, a Google Business Profile that matches your website, genuine reviews, and a site that is fast on a phone. Everything else is a refinement of those.
- See alsoLocal SEOGoogle Business Profile
- Local SEO
- The subset of SEO that decides whether you appear in the map results and the "near me" searches for your area.
- Local ranking weighs three things: relevance (does your content match the search), distance (how close you are to the searcher), and prominence (how well known and well reviewed you are). Only the first and third are within your control, which is where the work goes.
- See alsoGoogle Business ProfileNAP consistencyMap pack (local pack)
- Map pack (local pack)
- The block of three business listings with a map that appears near the top of local search results.
- For most local service searches the map pack takes the majority of clicks. Ranking there depends on your Google Business Profile far more than on your website — though the two have to agree with each other.
- See alsoGoogle Business Profile
- Google Business Profile
- The free Google listing that controls how your business appears in Google Maps and the local map pack. Formerly called Google My Business.
- For a local business this is usually higher-leverage than the website itself. Complete every field, choose categories carefully, add real photos, and answer every review.
- See alsoMap pack (local pack)NAP consistencyReviews
- NAP consistency
- Having your Name, Address, and Phone number written identically everywhere they appear online — your website, Google, Yelp, directories, and social profiles.
- Suite 133 in one place and Ste. 133 in another will not destroy you, but genuinely conflicting addresses or old phone numbers will. Fix the big ones and stop worrying about the punctuation.
- Reviews
- Public ratings left on your Google Business Profile and other platforms. Both a ranking factor and, for most buyers, the deciding factor.
- Volume, recency, and rating all matter, and so does whether you respond. Never offer anything of value in exchange for a review — that violates Google policy and can get your listing suppressed.
- Schema markup (structured data)
- Invisible code that spells out for search engines exactly what a page is about — that this is a business, at this address, offering these services, with these reviews.
- It does not directly raise rankings, but it is how you become eligible for rich results, and it is increasingly how AI answer engines decide what your business is and whether to recommend it.
- Meta description
- The short summary shown under your page title in search results. Roughly 150 characters before it gets cut off.
- It is not a ranking factor, but it heavily affects whether people click. Google frequently rewrites it anyway if it thinks it can do better.
- XML sitemap
- A machine-readable list of every page on your site, submitted to search engines so nothing gets missed.
- Core Web Vitals
- Google’s three measurements of real-world page experience: how fast the main content appears, how quickly the page responds to a tap, and how much the layout jumps around while loading.
- They are a genuine but modest ranking factor. They matter far more as a conversion factor — people abandon slow pages long before Google penalises them.
- See alsoPage speed
- Page speed
- How long a page takes to become usable, usually measured on a mid-range phone over a normal mobile connection rather than on a fast office laptop.
- Oversized images are the number one cause of slow small business sites, followed by too many plugins and a heavy theme. All three are fixable without a rebuild.
- Backlink
- A link from another website to yours. Search engines treat them as votes of confidence, weighted by how trustworthy the linking site is.
- A handful of genuine links — a chamber of commerce, a local news story, a client, a university — outperform hundreds of bought directory links, which at best do nothing.
- Conversion rate
- The percentage of visitors who do the thing you wanted — call, submit a form, book, donate, or buy.
- Traffic without conversion is a vanity metric. Doubling a 1 percent conversion rate is usually cheaper and faster than doubling traffic.
Apps & software
- Web application
- Software that runs in a browser and does something, rather than just presenting information. Client portals, booking systems, dashboards, and intake tools are all web applications.
- The dividing line from a website is whether users log in and data changes. If a spreadsheet is currently doing the job badly, you are probably describing a web application.
- See alsoNative appProgressive web app (PWA)
- Native app
- An app written specifically for iOS or Android and installed from the App Store or Google Play.
- Native gives the best performance and full access to device features, at the cost of maintaining two codebases. Most organizations asking for an app actually need a fast mobile website first.
- See alsoHybrid / cross-platform appProgressive web app (PWA)
- Hybrid / cross-platform app
- One codebase that produces both an iOS and an Android app, usually built with React Native or Flutter.
- For the large majority of business apps this is the right choice: roughly one build instead of two, with performance that is indistinguishable for anything short of a game or a heavy media app.
- See alsoNative app
- Progressive web app (PWA)
- A website that can be saved to a phone home screen and behaves much like an app, without any app store involved.
- Often the honest answer when someone asks for an app. No store review, no download friction, no separate build — and for many use cases the user cannot tell the difference.
- MVP (minimum viable product)
- The smallest version of a product that real users can actually use, built to test whether the idea works before spending the full budget.
- Discipline here saves more money than any other decision in software. The most expensive apps are the ones that launched with forty features nobody had validated.
- API
- A defined way for two systems to exchange data automatically — your website sending a form submission straight into your CRM, for example.
- The practical question when scoping an integration is whether the other system has a usable API. Some popular tools do not, and that changes the estimate significantly.
- Database
- The organized store where an application keeps its information — users, bookings, records, orders.
Money & contracts
- Scope creep
- The gradual addition of features and pages that were not in the agreed scope, usually one small request at a time.
- It is the main reason projects run late and over budget on both sides. A written scope with a clear change process protects the client as much as the vendor.
- Discovery
- The phase before design where the vendor learns your goals, audiences, content, and constraints, and produces a scope and timeline.
- On small projects this should be a conversation and a document, not a separately billed five-figure engagement.
- Retainer / care plan
- A recurring monthly fee covering updates, backups, security, hosting oversight, and a set amount of change work.
- Worth it if it includes real work and a defined response time. Not worth it if it is $200 a month for automated plugin updates you could get for $15.
- Fixed price vs hourly
- Fixed price means an agreed sum for an agreed scope. Hourly means you pay for time spent, with an estimate rather than a guarantee.
- Fixed price suits websites, where scope can be pinned down. Hourly or sprint-based suits applications, where requirements genuinely change as you learn. Be suspicious of a fixed price for complex software — it usually means the scope will be defended, not the outcome.
- Who owns the site
- Whether you or the vendor holds the domain, hosting account, source code, and design files when the relationship ends.
- Ask before signing. The answer should be that you own all of it. Proprietary-platform builds where you cannot take the site elsewhere are a real cost that never appears on the quote.
Still got a line item you do not recognise?
Send us the quote. We will tell you what each line actually means and whether it is worth what you are being charged, even if you end up hiring someone else. We would rather the Twin Cities had fewer bad websites in it.
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