Glossary

The terms you will hear when discussing a website, an app or business software, explained without jargon: what they mean and why they matter to you.

Websites & e-commerce

301 redirect
A permanent redirect from an old address to a new one, so that visitors and search engines find a page that has moved.
Content management system (CMS)
Software that lets you change a website’s text, images and pages without a developer.
Landing page
A standalone page built for one goal: a visitor arrives from an ad or a search and should take one action.
Responsive design
A website layout that adapts itself to the width of the screen, from a phone to a wide monitor.

Cross-platform app
An app whose single codebase runs on both iOS and Android.
MVP (minimum viable product)
The smallest version of a product with which real users can already complete one important job from start to finish.
Native app
An app built specifically for one platform, iOS or Android, with that platform’s own tools.
PWA (progressive web app)
A website that behaves like an app: it can be installed to the home screen and can work offline.

API
An agreed set of rules by which one program asks another for data or actions.
CRM
A system that keeps customer contacts, communication history and sales progress in one place.
Dashboard
A screen on which the key figures update themselves and are visible at a glance, without opening reports.
Source of truth
The system whose data is treated as correct when several systems show different values for the same thing.
System integration
Connecting two or more systems so that data moves between them automatically instead of being retyped by hand.
Webhook
An automatic message one system sends to another the moment an event happens.

AI agent
An AI system that does not just answer but carries out a sequence of actions itself to reach a goal.
AI hallucination
An answer from an AI system that sounds convincing but is invented or wrong.
Large language model (LLM)
An artificial intelligence model trained on a large body of text and able to generate and process text.
RAG (retrieval-augmented generation)
A method in which a language model first finds the relevant passages in your documents and bases its answer on them.

Idempotency
The property that repeating the same request several times leaves the same result as doing it once.
Staging environment
A copy of a website or system where changes are tried out before real users see them.
Technical debt
The accumulated consequences of quick decisions, which make every new change to a system take longer.

Canonical URL
A tag in a page’s code telling search engines which address is the main one when the same content is reachable at several.
Core Web Vitals
Three Google metrics that measure how fast a page loads, how quickly it responds and whether its content jumps about.
GEO (generative engine optimisation)
The effort to have a website’s content found and cited by AI search tools.
Technical SEO
Putting a website in order so that search engines can find it, read it and understand it correctly.