Common Website Redesign Terms

Common Website Redesign Terms

Our clients' knowledge about the website redesign process varies—some have experience with similar projects and know exactly what to expect, while others just know that their website is not meeting their users' needs and it is time for an upgrade. If you want to get more comfortable with the buzzwords, acronyms, and technical terms that are commonly used throughout a website redesign project, check out the list below.

  1. UX stands for user experience and encompasses all aspects of the user's interaction with the company, its services, and its products.
  2. CMS refers to a content management system. This is the platform you use to build your website (e.g., Drupal or WordPress). A CMS allows you to log in and make changes to your website's content. We recommend Drupal, an open-source CMS, to our clients for many reasons. To learn more about Drupal, view our news posts on its benefits.
  3. Hosting or “web hosting,” is the method of making your website available to the public on a web server. All websites need to be hosted and there are a variety of third parties that offer hosting services; however, it is important to ensure your hosting is secure. Upanup offers various managed hosting packages based on the size of a website and the amount of traffic it receives.
  4. Information architecture refers to the organization, structure, and relationships between content on a website. This involves creating systems for labeling, navigation, and search that support users' access to information by surfacing and presenting content when and where it's most intuitive.
  5. Responsive design is a coding technique that enables your website to “respond,” or reformat itself, to the screen size it is being viewed on. Responsive designs are a must for modern websites because they make your website readable and usable on smartphones and tablets. Without a responsive design, your website would appear miniature or compressed when viewed on a smaller screen, creating a less-than-optimal viewing experience for people on mobile devices.
  6. A Sitemap is an outline of how your website content will be organized. It shows the high-level naming structure, hierarchy, and menu layout for your website and where each page will live under that structure. It also can show cross-linkages between related pages. View our news posts on best practices for sitemaps for more information on how to organize your content. 
  7. CTA stands for "call to action" and is often used throughout a website to promote user engagement or generate leads.
  8. Back end vs front end refers to the different areas of the CMS. The back end of a site includes code that handles technical things like redirects for pages that are no longer on your website. A website’s front end is the part of the website that you see when you visit a website on a computer or mobile device. This is where you log in and make changes to your website’s content or pages, review form entries, etc.
  9. Content is a lot more than the written text on your site. Content also includes images, graphics, webforms, buttons, menus, etc. and there are best practices for how this information should be developed and organized on a website. See our news posts about best practices for website images to learn more. 
  10. Content governance is becoming increasingly popular and refers to the structure and workflow around the content of a website. For example, who is responsible for drafting, reviewing, and publishing content as well as who reviews, archives, or removes content. There are various models that can be used for this view our news post on content governance models for more information on each model.

If you want to learn more about what exactly a website redesign project entails, how to estimate a budget, or what a realistic timeline is get in touch with our team.