Web Design Terms You Should Know

Working online and building websites is becoming more common as people lean toward remote work. There are several web design terms you should know to make communication easier.

Whether you’re building your first website, working with a designer, or making changes to a newly designed site on your own, there are a few terms you’ll need to know. You can use the following guide to help you navigating building your website.

“A” record 

The “A” record of your website is used to point your site to a host. When you change web hosts, you will need to adjust the “A” record to point to another hosting company to allow your site to properly connect to the new hosting platform.

There are many reasons web designers change hosts:

• You need a faster host
• The size of your website increased
• You need a cost-effective solution for hosting
• Customer service concerns

Host

If you have a self-hosted website, you’ll need to pay for a web hosting company to house your files. Self-hosted websites give you more control over your content.

Every web host has a different hosting system, and you may need to experiment with different hosts to see which one is best for your business or blog. Just a everyone has different productivity systems that work for them, different companies are more compatible with some hosts than others.

For example, Flywheel allows you to install software on your website to easily transfer your hosting to the platform. They also offer 24-7 chat support and will assist you if you run into any changes. Other hosting platforms may not offer the same support, resources, or ease of transfer.

Some hosts will transfer data for you, while others may request that you oversee the transfer of your own data.

Bluehost is a popular and affordable host for new bloggers. Although some bloggers experience site speed concerns as their blogs grow, it’s really easy to switch hosts from BlueHost and to renew your domain. You can also purchase sub domains directly form the platform.

Hosting your own website give you more flexibility over changing your web theme, adjusting software, and design.

Self-hosted vs Third-Party Hosted Websites

Before you sign a contract with a third-party host, always remember to review the legal agreements about who has a right to the content posted on the platform.

It’s common to hear that if you don’t host your website, you don’t own your content. However, it’s always important to review company-specific standards and to meet with a lawyer to review your specific contract and content ownership agreements.

DNS

DNS records tie an identity to websites and the content posted from a specific domain.

The Domain Name System (DNS) of your website ties your IP address to your domain name. According to Cloudflare, a popular content delivery network company, “DNS translates domain names to IP addresses so browsers can load Internet resources”

Name Servers

The terms Name Servers and DNS are often used interchangeably, but there is a difference between the two. The name server for your website is part of a larger file where the location where your site is held. According to Dreamhost, a popular web host for bloggers and online businesses, “Nameservers form part of an online database known as the Domain Name System (DNS). “

CNAME Record

CNAME records are also commonly referred to by web hosts and designers, especially if you are making changes to your website. According to Google Support, “A Canonical Name or CNAME record is a type of DNS record that maps an alias name to a true or canonical domain name.”

Content Delivery Network (CDN) 

A Content Delivery Network (CDN) improves the ability of a website to serve content to different locations. Websites with global readers can benefit from using a CDN. In addition, some CDN companies improve the security of websites.

Content scraping, a common concern for bloggers, occurs when a website uses the RSS feed of another website to immediately copy new content to a different website. If the site indexes the content from the original source immediately, there is a change that the content scraper will not only rank for the copied content in Google but start to build an audience from the stolen content.

Domain Registrar

Your domain registrar is the location where you purchased/registered your domain. For example, if I purchased my domain from Bluehost, then Bluehost would be the domain registrar for my site, even after I transferred to a different host.

It’s best to renew your domain early or purchase several years of your domain if you know you want to keep your domain.