From Core Web Vitals (CWVs) and eCommerce to User Experience and Accordions, web development and design has a language all its own. To help our clients better understand the development process and make it as smooth as possible, Vortex Digital has put together a knowledge base of commonly used Web Design and Development terminology.
The process of developing a website. This includes creating an excellent User Experience (UI/UX), ensuring best practice usage of modern coding and programming such as HTML, CSS, JavaScript and other languages, and HTTPS.
Many different tools are used to create an effective website, such as SEO protocols that reflect Google’s latest algorithms for ranking well, Schema markup languages, ADA compliance, eCommerce and payment gateways, page load speeds optimization and literally hundreds of other details.
Refers to the look and feel of a website and how well users can navigate through the site. This begins with strategic planning for the designer/creative director to fully understand the goals of the client and what they want to achieve. Next the designer creates a wire-frame showing how the user will interact with the site and its navigation.
Web design focuses on how users interact with the website and its graphic design, reflecting the brand standard color schemes, fonts and overall focus of the site. The web designer’s goal is to create an ergonomic flow and User Experience (UX) that fulfills the visitor’s reason for being there and the website’s goals for existing, i.e. education, eCommerce, taking action, and more.
The main purpose of UI/UX is to ensure that users can click through and interact with the website properly and effectively to get access to the information that they are looking for in as few clicks as possible. To help guide users from page to page, we use positioning statements, CTAs (Calls to Action), buttons, accordions, and a fixed header navigation to help users fulfill their reasons for visiting.
These are the core metrics that deal with how quickly a site loads and are essential to ensuring that your website is functioning at its best. See CWVs in SEO to learn more. They include Largest Contentful Paint, Time to Interactive, and Cumulative Layout Shift.
This is one of the most important factors Google looks at when ranking websites, and it is imperative that pages adhere to these guidelines as much as possible.
eCommerce is simply the act of selling products and services online. When someone opens a website for their business and sells their products online, that website constitutes an eCommerce website. There are many factors to take into consideration when developing a successful eCommerce website such as ensuring that the proper security measures are being taken for the clients’ financial and shipping information, an easily manageable database of products, product imagery, and more.
