Web Jargon Guide Part 1 - Web design Edinburgh

Web Jargon Guide Part 1 - The website design and development process

During our website design process, you will meet a number of different terms and ideas, many of them when filling out our Project Questionnaire. It's all fairly straightforward, but here's our quick guide to common web development, design and business terms to help you!

PROJECT QUESTIONNAIRE / DESIGN BRIEF
First of all, we need to know about you and your company. Our automated Project Questionnaire is a step-by-step wizard which will provide us with your design brief - your statement of needs, likes and dislikes - which we will use to guide us in your web project and to formulate creative ideas and the logical, structural requirements that your business will make of your website. The Project Questionnaire, will make you think about everything from what pages you need, to what styles and colours fit your business image. As we often say, this won't just help us - it will often help you get better acquainted with your business!

TARGET MARKET
This question is one of the first in our Project Questionnaire, and often one which causes some confusion. What does target market actually mean? Many people can't quite get the idea of a physical market lined with market stalls out of their head! All this term really means is the segment of available buyers, at which your particular product or service is aimed. It is often defined in terms of age, gender, geography and socio-economic status. For example, "young business owners and public sector workers, mostly female" or "students and teenagers, male and female, middle class, consumers" or "primary school aged children and their parents, consumers, primary schools". This information helps us to develop and visual theme and to use language which is thought appropriate or appealing to your audience.

VECTOR FORMAT
If you intend to supply us with a pre-existing logo for your business, it's particularly helpful if you can supply it in vector format. This is a kind of format where the shapes and colours are mathematically represented in such a way that the artwork can be regenerated again and again at any given size without loss of quality. Check the CD or original files your logo designer supplied you with. Depending on the demands of your website design, it's not always necessary to have the logo in vector format. We can redraw a logo in vector format if necessary.

DOMAIN NAME
This is the address of your website on the Internet - for example edinburghwebdesigns.co.uk or nominet.org.uk - and it's important to get it right. Put down some ideas, and we'll give you a call to discuss them. You may want to incorporate keywords into the domain, for example edinbughjewelry.co.uk, or for branding reasons you may wish to make it more distinct, e.g. sparklingstones.co.uk. A helpful way to think of your domain is to imagine giving it out over the phone to a customer. Will it be easy to pronounce? Will you always need to spell it out? Consider also length, and if you're a business trading in the UK you should try to secure a .co.uk domain name, even though there is more competition for them than some other suffixes. Of course, your first choice may not be available (as only one person or organisation at a time can own a given domain name) - use the "whois" search box on nominet.org.uk to find out.

TAGLINE
Also known as strapline, byline or slogan. Is there a sentence with a certain lilt to it that sums up why your business is different - what it offers over the next guy? Often it will be appropriate to work this into the graphical design of the website.

DESIGN CONCEPT / MOCK-UP
We work with your design tastes and preferences, and inject our own creative ideas to produce a design concept - a dummy, non-functional image which is effectively a proposal for how your website will look. This concept may portray website structure and ideas for presentation of your information and sales messages. It will normally either show the home page or both the home page and a "secondary" page, to give a clearer idea of how the layout of the site will differ between pages. A design concept is provided precisely to allow you to assess how closely our artistic interpretation fits with your vision for your website. Sometimes, the first concept will be dead-on, or occasionally you will want us to provide another idea. When you are happy with your concept, we will ask you to sign it off - that is, agree that you are happy to proceed with refinements to this design and ultimately have it converted into an HTML website.

DESIGN REVISION
The design revision is the process by which we refine your chosen design concept in accordance with your feedback and any further ideas and inspiration we have. Occasionally only one revision round is required, though the norm is usually two or three revision rounds. Once we've achieved a refined design concept which you are delighted with, we will ask you to confirm your acceptance of it, so that we can commit to the complex process of cutting the images up and recreating the website in HTML and CSS, the languages of the web, ready for public use.

HTML / XHTML / CSS LAYOUT
We will convert your finalised design concept into an HTML/CSS layout. This means we will use the language of HTML (hypertext mark-up language) and CSS (cascading style sheets) to write a document in accordance with web standards, which describes to web browsers how to display your website, and how it should work. Depending on the website, this can be a time intensive and complex process. Therefore, it's important to be sure we have agreed that you are happy with the design concept first. Of course, content text and images can easily be changed later on, but any changes to the fundamental design of the website after this stage will involve some upheaval.

CONTENT MANAGEMENT SYSTEM (CMS)
You can specify on the Project Questionnaire which pages you need to be able to edit the content of. We can install our Simple Content Management System for those pages. This allows you to login to an administration area on your website, and edit the text and images of the content areas of the relevant pages, using a simple system similar to a word processor. Just click Save and your changes will be made to your live website immediately! You can update your website from anywhere with an Internet connection.

WEB HOSTING / WEB SPACE
This is where your website is kept on the Internet. Often this is called a Server or Web Server. It could be located in the same town as you, in the same country or even in another country. Edinburgh Web Designs' web server is located in London. The location of your web server doesn't make any practical difference in accessing it for either updating or viewing your website. Search engine considerations though, make it wise to locate it in the same country as your target audience. Web hosting is available cheaply (typically for a few pounds a month) from hundreds of different web hosting companies. You may already have web hosting set up with another company, and we are able to use that easily when creating your website. Alternatively, we can offer you reliable web hosting with all the latest features at a competitive price, so you don't have the hassle of searching for your own plan.

GOING LIVE / SET LIVE
Setting your website to live mode is simply the process of making it publicly accessible. Your website will be developed in a private test area which can only be seen by you, so that changes and tests can be made until the website is ready and suitable for public viewing. We usually require any outstanding payments for your website to be made before switching it to live mode. Once it goes live it's time to start publicising your new site!