Know your terms
Last week we broke down some basic WordPress terms to help keep web professionals and their clients speaking in the same language. This week we’re looking at some essential website vocabulary. We hope a list of common terms associated with a conventional website will help customers and professionals communicate more clearly to one another.
- Layout
Layout is the structure of a website rather than its styling. For example, this page uses a 2-column layout with one sidebar to the left of the main content area. The main content area and the sidebar are elements of the site’s layout which are styled to reflect the website’s look and feel. - Style
How a site’s layout is made to look. Style includes the colours, fonts, spacing, graphics, effects and similar decoration that is applied to a site’s layout. - Content
The text and images that make up the information that is displayed by a website. Websites are, at their most fundamental level, a means of displaying, organising and communicating information. This information is a website’s content. For example, this blog post is a piece of ‘content’. Content is distinct from a website’s layout and styling; layout and style are used to present content in the desired way but the structure and the look of a site are distinct from its content. In other words, we could change the style of the fonts used on this website, but that change wouldn’t affect the words used in this post. - Functionality What a website *does*. Content doesn’t *do* anything. It is a ‘static’ display of text and images that may link to other content or external sites or services but it doesn’t interact with a user. Functionality is when a website does something with information it gets from a user. For instance, an ecommerce system has functionality to let customers choose products, enter shipping details and make payments.
- Static Content Pages
Informative content that does not change over time and is (usually) available from a website’s navigation, for example an About Us page is a typical example of a ‘static content page’. - Dynamic Content
Content that is updated via a stream or service. For example, you can subscribe to our RSS feed. - Header
The top section of a website, which often includes such things as a logo, a tagline, links to social networks, a contact number and navigation. - Navigation
Sometimes referred to as ‘menus’, navigation are the main links which let users move around your website. Navigation may be included anywhere, but is conventionally found in the header and/or a sidebar. There can be many levels of navigation with main navigation and sub-navigation. - Main Content
What you’re reading right now is in the ‘main content’ of this page. The main content is the information most relevant to a particular page. - Sidebar To the left of what you are reading is a sidebar. Conventionally, websites have 1, 2 or no sidebars. Sidebars often include things such as supplementary information, dynamic content, navigation, contact forms, newsletter sign ups and advertisements.
- Footer The section at the bottom of a web page. This often includes copyright information and some navigation links.
We appreciate you reading and hope our website vocabulary list is helpful to you.