Glossary: Useful words and acronyms for digital projects

In its simplest form this the structure or sitemap for a website. Looked at in more depth, IA is concerned with how the content (or information) is arranged so that users can find what they need most efficiently. This means organising, structuring and labeling content in an effective way. The goal being to help users find information and complete tasks. To do this, we need to understand how the pieces fit together to create the larger picture, how items relate to each other within the system and the rules and criteria for both managing and offering them to the end user.

The trick here is looking at the content from a user perspective rather than from an organisational point of view (see UX below for more). It's one of the first stages to work through in a project and the decisions made here can influence the design of the site further down the line. Often it raises tricky questions and that's why we work with clients to create personas. Refering back to these personas can help us to prioritise content across the website to help a client meet their business goals.

This is a huge area of our work - it's about approaching a project from the user's perspective or experience rather than the internal point of view of the business. This requires that the project team empathises with their user(s) and use that to drive decision making through a project. That might seem simple, even obvious, but organisations can often have differing internal needs and expectations . A UX approach to web development allows everyone to stand apart from these potential points of conflict and put the user in the driving seat. As such it informs the language of your site, from the look and feel, navigation, body copy to every link and button.

You want to make sure your website users get what they want and need from you and this requires insight and empathy with your audiences/users. You may provide resources and pay for your website but ultimately it belongs to your users, so it must be built for them. To help with this we work with you to develop personas. Each persona represents a target audience, fleshed out with details gleaned from user research, analytics and your experience of your customers to make them feel like a real person who you can design the website for. These personas can then be 'consulted' during decision making further along the project.

Wikipedia defines a wireframe as a blueprint - which is quite a nice way of thinking about it. A wireframe lays out the content and shows the functionality of a page. It plays a key part in visualising the content model and helping to define the specification and provide a framework for the website design. Typically we'll produce wireframes for a variety of key pages (we use content types, a bit like templates, so one wireframe will cover multiple pages in the sitemap).

This one is also fairly self explanatory. A call to action is something that provokes your website user to *do* something - that might be to buy a ticket or product, sign-up to a mailing list, join a group or donate to a project you're running. It could be as simple as filling in a form or downloading an important report. A site or project will have multiple CTAs and in truth every page ought to have one (you ought never leave a user with nothing to do). However, there can and usually are different level's of CTA, with the more important ones associated with the site's most important user journeys or Red Routes (named after inner city transport routes along which no parking or blocking is permitted

Often CTA's will be things that are worth monitoring in your KPIs and will help you identify you're losing customers so that you can fix it! This blog post from Paul Boag outlines how to make an effective call to action.

This could refer to a couple of different things and as such often gets confusing for those with less digital experience. The domain hosting refers to the ownership and management of your domains. Often we find that clients will own several domains through several different hosts and may even have outsourced this to previous developers.

We recommend getting these hosted all in one place that you can access whenever you need to - ie you're not reliant on a supplier to do so. We also recommend that you don't set the contact email address as a member of staff. Various renewals and verifications will use the contact address you give so you need to be able to receive them in case of staff absences or changes. A website launch requires access to this so make sure you have your ducks in a row in advance of the website launch to keep things simple.

Then there's website hosting which is about the server(s) that the website sits on. This is usually billed as a monthly or annual fee and is included within our SLA for clients who choose to host their sites with us. Our SysAdmin team manage and monitor our servers to help ensure that your website runs as efficiently as possible.

This is just another way of saying online retail or describing the action of selling things online. There are lots of ways to do this and a lot has been published about the best way to do this. A lot of this learning can be applied to selling tickets online.

Losely this is a way of describing that two or more different software systems can or will be set up to talk to each other/share information. There are different ways to do this. We've built sites to integrate with

• CRM systems (most often ticketing/box office),
• email lists,
• social media,
• fundraising tools,
• collections management systems,
• archives

- the list goes on. Every project is different depending on the level of integration required and the workflow of an organisation. We've written a list of key terms that we think you should know if you're embarking on an integration project.

This can be about the terms of use of the website but if you sell anything online it must include your terms and conditions of sale as well. We're often asked for examples of these but it is something that is specific to a company and should absolutely already exist somewhere in your company as it's a legal requirement.

An SSL certificate provides a secure connection between the website users' internet browsers and websites. This means that a user can safely submit private details online to sign up to a mailing list or make an online transaction. You can tell if an SSL has been set up by looking at the address bar in your browser - secure sites display a padlock and possibly a green address bar (it depends which browser you're using).

We provide our clients with a content guide when we deliver CMS training. This includes details of images and typography in use on the site and brief info about good practice (how to use headers to best effect and filenames for images you will upload).

It will outline all the different images that you will need to upload across your site, giving you the dimensions for each one and the corresponding file size. We also list out the different font sizes and style that are available on the site so that you know what to expect.

This is the part of the project that is down to the client. At CMS training we will provide you with your CMS logins and then it's over to you to populate the site with all of your content! The content load phase also doubles as a testing phase for clients before the launch of the website. If you come across any bugs during this period we will be there to help resolve them in the run up to the launch of the site.

Under the Data Protection Act 1998 every company is required to have a data protection policy. If your website allows users to submit any personal information then you need to have this reflected on your website so that users can make an decision about whether they want to give you their details. The content of the privacy policy on your website should reflect your organisational policy and explain to your website users what you will use their data for.

The Data Protection Act 1998 is governed by 8 key principles that you can read about here. If you are covered by the Freedom of Information Act then you should also include details of that on this page or an associated, specific page. This is another one where we're often asked for example. Like your T&Cs, it is something that is specific to a company and should absolutely already exist somewhere in your company as it's legally required.

This is how content is categorised and organised. It might be that a venues events are categorised as music, theatre or dance; that list would make up the taxonomy library for events. If a website has filters on it then there will be a taxonomy library with preset options driving that filter. How things are classified should always be driven from the user perspective to make sure that it's useful and that the terms being used make sense. Sometimes taxonomy is used 'behind the scenes' to control how or where information displays on a website. 

This is a term that's thrown around all the time these days. It's about thinking digital and customer first to ensure your systems work efficiently and effectively for your customers and staff. This often involves working more closely across teams/departments than in the past. Without commitment and investment from the top it's very hard to get this going - a problem that companies across all sectors have encountered. There are several definitions out there - this is how we understand it. Here's an interesting bit of research and analysis about definitions and implementation by Jason Bloomberg.

There are an awful lot of abbreviations to get your head round in the wider world of digital marketing.

• Econsultancy compiled over 100 frequently used acronyms which is worth bookmarking for future reference.
• NESTA have also compiled a list of terms off the back of their R&D fund that you might find handy.

If you think we've missed anything off - or any of our explanations aren't clear enough - drop us a line on email or twitter and let us know!