In conversations with clients, or family and friends, I’ll find myself talking about web design and using terms that I use in my every day worklife. Every job has a different jargon that you learn over time through school or the workplace that you need to use in order to complete your job. I thought I would compile a list of helpful terms and phrases that designers, web geeks, and other internet gurus might use.

browser – this is not a tough one, I know, but I often ask clients what browser they are using and I often hear a long pause. This is the program you’re using to access the internet: Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Opera, etc.

pixels – the dots on a computer monitor, and the form of measurement used most commonly on the internet. Other forms of measurement are em and points.

domain/url – this is address for your site: http://www.yoursite.com

hosting – your web host stores all of the files for your website so that it may appear online.

whitespace – all the good space around stuff that makes text easier to read and images easier to see.

box model – this is the model that contains the makeup of a website. It includes divs, padding, margins and their relations to one another.

div – these are essentially boxes that compose websites (tables are bad, divs are good!).

padding – this is the space within a div, giving objects room between one another.

css – short for cascading style sheets, these are the styles that make websites look pretty. You can give things color, backgrounds, sizes and all sorts of fun styles.

favicon – this is the tiny little icon next to the url in your browser.

focal point – focal point is more of an art term, but it’s very important in web design. Try to make too many things stand out and although everything screams at you, nothing stands out anymore. Choose one focal point, or maybe a few important items, and stick to it.

rss – short for really simple syndication. This publishes podcasts, blogs and other things that are frequently updated to a feed that people can subscribe to.

wysiwyg – what you see is what you get. A wysiwyg editor allows website code to be magically transformed into readable text and real images so anyone can edit websites without having to deal with the messy code part.