Glossary of Project Terms

Brand Assets

This is whatever files you have for your branding. We ask you for these at the start of the project. They might include a logo or logo variations, and/or brand guidelines (covering colours, typography, illustrations, photography, etc.).

Callout

This is a visually distinct section of a page that ‘calls out’ another page. The point is to provide multiple pathways through the site to discover relevant content. It could be calling out one important, relevant page, or a group of subpage callouts in one section, such as a grid of images on your About page that link to related pages.

Category

This is the most common taxonomy used on most websites, to filter high-volume content into groups. We recommend a short list of categories (no more than 10), and using labels that your audience will understand and would naturally want to use as filters.

Content Relationships

In the sitemap and UX wireframes we plan navigation. One way that people navigate websites is by being shown related content and clicking it. This keeps people on your site longer, and moves them closer to conversion points. We strategize which content has natural relationships, where to introduce related content on pages, and how to present it.

Detail Page

This is what we call one custom page template that will be used for multiple instances on your site. An example is a project detail page. We design one page, and the same template is used for all projects. Detail pages listed in the sitemap and UX/UI designs can later be built as a subpage or as a post type. Learn more about pages vs. posts in WordPress.

Footer Menu

This menu sits at the bottom of all of your site’s pages. It usually contains links to all key content, contact information, and fine print links to your privacy policy and terms and conditions. It might also include elements like CTA buttons, a land acknowledgement, or logos. Learn more about footer menu optimization and about menus.

Full Sitemap

This is the expansion of the preliminary sitemap deliverable. Its purpose is to recommend strategic lists of content per page, including callouts and content relationships. This work gets significantly expanded in the UX wireframes. Learn more about sitemaps.

Hierarchy

This is the backbone of your website. Google and other search engines like websites with a well-defined hierarchy, rather than a flat one where all pages sit at the same level. In the sitemap we plan this hierarchy with some pages sitting at the top level, some pages sitting under other pages, and some pages having an associated post type (often called a ‘detail page’ in the sitemap). The hierarchy is supported by a matching permalink structure.

Interior Pages

For the UX and UI designs, we always share the homepage design deliverable first, by itself. The next deliverable is the interior designs, which, for project purposes, means all other pages in your site. These are referred to as interior wireframes.

Lorem Ipsum

This is a standard placeholder text that’s used in design across the world. We use it because it keeps the focus on page structure, flows, layouts (UX), and the look and feel (UI). Using your real text, while possible, usually results in feedback about the content rather than the design itself.

Mega-Menu

This is what we call dropdown menus that are more complex than a box with a single list of pages—which is the most common type of menu, and there’s nothing wrong with it! A mega-menu might include elements like columns of links, an image, or a CTA button.

Menu Items

These are the labels/words in your menu(s), and in any drop-down menus. They usually click through to pages with the same name, but occasionally we are asked to design primary menus where the menu items don’t click to a page. Learn more about clickable vs. non-clickable menu items.

Mobile Mock

This is a mockup of your homepage for mobile devices. It shows the mobile menu and how page elements will responsively shift when the screen size shrinks.

Navigation

This is your site’s menus and other means for a user to move through the site, driven by links. It includes a main or primary menu, a footer menu, and can sometimes also include a utility menu. It also includes elements like buttons, related content sections, callouts to other pages, and other types of linking. Learn more about menus.

Page

This is a webpage with a unique template. For higher-volume subpages, we build them as a post type instead of as a page. There’s no difference to your audience, and the only difference to you is where you find them in your site’s dashboard. Learn more about pages vs. posts in WordPress.

Post or Post Type

Like a page, a post looks like a webpage with a unique template. But in the backend of your site, posts are grouped in their own dashboards, separate from the pages dashboard. We build post types for higher volume content, like events or blog posts, or when multiple pages will use the same template, such as if you have eight services. Learn more about pages vs. posts in WordPress.

Pre-Footer CTA

This is what we call a content section that sits below the last main content on your pages, and above the footer menu. It calls out the logical next step a person should take after reading that page, such as contacting you, visiting another page, or booking a demo.

Preliminary Sitemap

This is the initial blueprint for your website. It captures all necessary menus, the recommended hierarchy, and page templates. This is how we start to collaborate on planning the ideal paths through your site based on audience goals, and how many unique templates are needed to capture all of your content. Learn more about sitemaps.

Primary Menu

This is also called the main menu. It sits at the top of all pages. Your site may only have a primary menu, or it might also have a utility menu. Learn more about menus.

Prototype

We use this term at the UX stage. It refers to the design deliverable that contains all of the wireframes for your pages. You can click and scroll through everything within the prototype.

Structure

This can refer to one of two things. It can be your site structure, which is another phrasing for the hierarchy of pages. It can also be page structure, which is the layout of the entire page (as opposed to the layouts of individual sections). You collaborate with us on, and approve, your page structures in the UX stage.

Style Tile

This is a deliverable that presents visual explorations of your brand identity applied to web elements. It contains things like a colour palette, button shapes, photo sizes, illustrative patterns, and typography. It’s not a page mockup and it doesn’t use real content. Its focus is honing the direction for your visual design.

Subpage

This is a page that lives under another page in the hierarchy of your site. The easiest example is the About page, which often has other pages linked from it, like Governance, Careers, Team, or Sustainability. In this example, the hierarchy of your site goes Home > About > Careers.

Taxonomy

This refers to the way that content is filtered. It’s the same concept as the Dewey Decimal System in libraries—it organizes groups of similar content in a way that makes sense for your users. It’s most often used for high-volume content like blogs, but can be applied to any area of your site. The most common place to see taxonomies in action is anywhere that you have filters (on the frontend), and where you assign taxonomies to content so it shows up with the right group (in the backend). Your site may also use ‘hidden’ taxonomies that aren’t linked in filters, but are used by your team to make specific content appear in a Query Block.

Taxonomy Terms

Terms are the options within a taxonomy. Like taxonomies, we recommend choosing labels that your audience would understand and use. If the taxonomy is Region, the terms could be the names of provinces, or the names of regions within a province.

Template

This is a single page design that gets built. You can later select a template to quickly create new pages. ‘Template’ has negative connotations in the world of websites, because there are platforms where users can purchase free templates that are also used by thousands of other sites. All of our templates are custom-designed for you, then custom-built to exactly match what you approve. Then they’re yours forever.

UI

This stands for user interface. In our projects it refers to the visual design stage and deliverables. This is where we collaborate on the look and feel of pages through full page mockups. Learn more about our UI design services.

Utility Menu

This is a secondary menu that sits above your primary menu. It might be smaller, or it can be the same size. We use these for sites that have too many pages to fit into one menu, placing secondary content in the utility menu (ie. content that isn’t the primary audience’s main goal to find). Sometimes a utility menu only contains one or two pages, or just items like a phone number, a search bar, or a region or translation toggle. Learn more about menus.

UX

This stands for user experience, and in our projects it refers to the UX design stage and deliverables. This is where we collaborate on the page structure and user flows for each page, through wireframes. Learn more about our UX design services.

Wireframe

This is a single page design that captures menus and layouts. The set of wireframes enables you to click and scroll through a skeleton of the site, in-browser, and give feedback on the recommended content shapes, layouts, and the overall flow through the site.

Backend

This is the ‘editor’ view of a page or post, or one of the dashboard views within WordPress—anywhere that a logged in user could be managing your site. The term usually comes up in QA tickets relating to where we’re advising you to look for a setting or function, or where to make a change.

Block

Each page on your website is made up of sections with unique layouts, and within those layouts are multiple individual elements called blocks. Examples are a heading block, a paragraph block, and an image block. These blocks all have their own settings that we configure to match your approved UI designs. Then you have full control over the settings after launch. Learn more about all of the Refoundry blocks.

Build

This is another word for development—it’s the process through which our developers create your site. We sometimes mention things like ‘build completion’ (ie. the development is done), the ‘beta build’ (the built but not-yet-tested development site), building something custom for a request, or build documentation. Learn more about our custom WordPress development.

Component

This is a saved collection of blocks that make up one layout or page section. Traditional web development involves hard-coding all page layouts (often controlled by themes). The way we build websites is by building components for each section of your pages. The components are made up of individual blocks, and can even include nested components. There are component-level settings on top of the settings for each block within it. You can control all of this in the visual editor, and also move components around the page or add/remove blocks within a component.

Component Library

This is where all of the unique components that we build for your site are stored, as well as some base Refoundry components. You can build new pages or modify existing pages by searching for components by name, or by copy/pasting them from other pages. The components that live in your library are the global instances. If you modify them, every local (ie. individual) instance of that same component acro

Development Site

This is what we call your new site while it’s being built and updated, throughout the QA process right up until it launches. It’s technically online, but it’s a hidden sandbox that search engines can’t find. When we launch your site, the development site overwrites your existing site.

Excerpt

Depending on your chosen design, some pages may show excerpts where they appear within groups of posts. You can configure these per post in the upper right corner of the editor, where it says “Edit excerpt.” If you don’t create a custom excerpt, the excerpt space may be empty or it might display the first text found on the page, truncated.

Featured Image

This is the image that people see when your page or post is shared on social media, by DM, and in mobile search results. We set a fallback image in Yoast so that if no featured image is configured, all pages and posts will show an attractive, branded image. You can set a custom feature image per page and post, in the upper right corner of the editor, where it says “Set featured image.”

Frontend

This is the ‘live’ view of your site. It can also refer to the published view of an individual page or post. It usually comes up in QA tickets relating to where you’ve seen a problem, or as the place that we’re asking you to look or test.

Functionality

This is how we describe the way individual elements of your site need to perform. In the design stage it comes up when discussing how elements or sections are meant to work, like menus, interactions, scrolling content, forms, embeds, search bars, and filters. In the QA stage it can come up if you expected something to work differently from how it does. It can also come up at any point in the project if you request something that requires custom design or development that wasn’t part of the project scope.

Gravity Forms

This is a free plugin that we use to build the forms shown in your designs, unless you have a pre-existing form tool that you prefer to embed. Gravity Forms is easy to use, so you can modify existing forms or add more forms after launch.

Gutenberg

This is the visual, block-based editor in WordPress. It replaced the classic editor with its single text box. Refoundry was engineered to expand Gutenberg and make it even more flexible. Refoundry is not proprietary; any developer that can work on Gutenberg can modify your new site.

Import

We may be able to import certain types of content from your existing site directly into the development site. If your site isn’t on WordPress, we have to test exporting and importing to verify if anything is possible, and if what is possible can be done within the project scope. Approved imports are included in your contract, and newly discovered imports require additional scope. Imports are also as-is, which means the content is pulled into a flexible page section. The content inherits your new site’s styles and block-based settings, but any other changes are up to you to make.

Media Library

This is the place in WordPress where all of your images and PDFs live. You can navigate to it via the black menu on the left. From there you can search for and open individual images, add alt text, change image titles, and find individual image and PDF URLs.

Patterns

WordPress patterns are reusable, pre-designed layouts that can be inserted into pages or posts. They help maintain consistency across your site, while making it easy to edit all instances at once. An example is a pre-footer CTA block that encourages people to contact you. If you want to edit the text in all instances, you can do so if it’s built as a synced pattern. You can also create your own patterns, and turn other sections into patterns. Patterns have a purple icon in the Refoundry editor, so that they stand out from Refoundry blocks.

Permalink

This is a URL or web address for a page. If we bring up permalinks in your project, it’s usually to ask for input on naming conventions for subdirectories. For example, if you have services, the logical subdirectory part of the permalink would be ‘services’: sitetitle.com/services/service-title/. But sometimes the ideal name isn’t obvious. And sometimes we get requests to follow a specific permalink structure for SEO purposes, and have to discuss what is and isn’t possible.

Refoundry

This is the low-code platform that we engineered to expand Gutenberg and give our clients control over every element of their site and pages. Block settings, global settings, layouts, the works. Although we created it, it’s still open source code so any developer can work on it post-launch. We have built all of our sites on Refoundry since late 2022.

Responsive

In the context of your website, responsive means that we design and build it to adapt to various screen sizes that your audience might use. We don’t do a separate set of mobile designs, because we don’t have to. Every individual component is responsive from the get-go.

Reusable Component Block

This is essentially a wrapper around a component (layout) that enables you to place it on a page or post, and edit it without modifying the original component—while still being able to inherit any changes made to the original. For example, you might have a pre-footer CTA section that appears on all pages. On most pages it links to your Contact page, but on the About page it needs to link to Careers. If you edit the original pre-footer CTA component in the library, it will update all instances to link to Careers. But you can edit the RCB on the About page to link to Careers without affecting the other pre-footer CTAs. On the flipside, if you want to change the button colour on all pre-footer CTAs, you edit the original component. Every RCB containing that pre-footer CTA will now have the new button colour.

Theme

A traditional WordPress theme is a rigid set of files that restricts styles and prevents anyone but a developer from modifying layouts. That’s not the case with our sites. The theme on Refoundry sites exists because WordPress requires a theme file, but ours is mostly empty. We moved all of the style and layout settings into the blocks themselves. This also helps page speed, because bulky theme files can slow down load times.

WordPress

This is the content management system (CMS) that’s the foundation for Refoundry, and for all of our websites. We have always built sites on WordPress because it uses open source code, it’s SEO-friendly, and it’s infinitely expandable through plugins and integrations. We engineered Refoundry to address common complaints about traditional, hard-coded WordPress sites, like bulky theme files slowing down page speeds, and clients not being able to modify settings or layouts without paying a developer.

2FA

This is two-factor authentication, which helps protect your site from hackers. It requires you to receive a text or email with a code, to finish logging in. We require you (and all users on your site) to set this up for security. It’s a 30-second pain in the butt that saves hours, days, and even weeks of misery if you get hacked.

Brevo

This is an SMTP service that allows your website to send emails to people, such as account creations, password resets, 2FA codes, and confirmation emails. It’s free up to a cap on emails per month. We ask you to sign up for this unless you have another service that can do all of the same functions.

Client Review

This is the name for the rounds of review that you do during QA—Client Review 1 and Client Review 2. It means that you are putting in tickets, and we’re waiting until you’re done to work on them so that we don’t risk overwriting your work. The exception is if something is preventing you from finishing your review. ‘Client – Review’ is also the name of a column in BugHerd, which houses tickets waiting for your team to review the work that was done by our team.

Client – Resources

This is the name of a column in BugHerd. It houses tickets that contain how-to videos that we’ve made to answer your questions in other tickets.

Client – To Do

This is the name of a column in BugHerd. It houses tickets that we need you to address. This is usually things like missing content, or areas where we need input to configure something for you.

CSS – Done

This is the name of a column in BugHerd. It houses tickets that required a developer to do work, and now they need to be reviewed by our team.

Domain

We will ask you for access to your domain for launch day. This is so we can point the domain at the new site, set up domain-level email authorization, and other tasks.

FS – CSS

This is the name of a column in BugHerd. It houses tickets (submitted by our team or yours) that require a developer to do the work. The QA Lead is the only person who moves tickets to this column.

Google Maps API Key

If you have a Google Maps block on your site, you need an API key for it to work. We ask you to set up this key and share it with us ahead of launch. Learn more about the Google Maps block and API key.

Hosting

You might stay with your current host, or switch to our Pantheon hosting. Either way, we need access to your current web host. If you’re staying on that host, this is where we deploy the new site, install SSL (the security protocol that encrypts data between your site and the server), configure PHP (a language your server uses to translate your site code into a page that it sends to a person’s browser), and other tasks. If you’re moving to Patheon, we need access to execute the migration. Learn more about our hosting service.

Launch Requirements

This is a set of to-dos that we need from you in order to launch your site. ‘Client – Launch requirements’ is also the name of a column in BugHerd, which houses tickets requesting specific details that we need to collect ahead of launch day. These include things like hosting details, reCAPTCHA, an admin email, and other necessities.

Pantheon

This is the web host where we offer hosting on a dedicated server. We are not Pantheon, we are a partner. We picked Pantheon because they have a strong reputation, great customer service,  and lots of features and options for tech savvy clients—but you aren’t required to engage with Pantheon if we’re providing hosting. Learn more about our hosting service.

QA

Quality assurance is the final project stage before launch, when we do extensive rounds of review and testing. You will also see ‘QA’ in Hive task titles. It also sits at the top of the first column in BugHerd, housing tickets (submitted by our team or yours) that are waiting to be assigned within our team.

reCAPTCHA

If you have a form on your site, we will ask you to sign up for this free tool and provide us with the key. It helps prevent form spam.

Sneak Peek

This is a Basecamp thread where we share the newly built site. It has not been through our internal QA testing yet, we just want to show you what’s been going on behind the scenes. The site may have your content if it was ready before development started, or it may have placeholder content.

Support

This is the period after your site launches, for the rest of its lifecycle. This begins when we guide you off of Basecamp to start using our support portal, which logs tickets directly into our developers’ system. If you’re on a maintenance package, you get priority attention and a preferred rate. But if you’re not, we’ll still address your request as quickly as possible.  

Ticket

This is a task in BugHerd, our QA ticketing system. Tickets are tagged to pages by your team and by our team during QA reviews. They live in columns that indicate who they are for, and get moved around as they are worked on and reviewed. Tickets always include a description, and may also include comments.

Accessibility

We design and build our sites to WCAG accessibility standards. If you ask us to make changes that will impact accessibility, we’ll push back. We don’t use an accessibility checker during QA by default unless specifically requested and included in your contract. This is because Refoundry was engineered for accessibility, our designers are skilled at accessible design, and we test all of the components that we build before they get used. But if you use an accessibility checker and issues come up, we’ll work through them together.

Content

Not to be confused with brand assets, this is the text, images, and other media that go into your new website. We provide the tools to collect content in the necessary formats, and we don’t accept content provided in other formats unless your contract states an exception. Exceptions must be agreed upon during the sales process or, if requested mid-project, negotiated with the salesperson.

Gantt Chart

This is the visual representation of the project, using bar graphs to show stages. All of the tasks required for every stage are included for transparency. This helps you see where the project is at, what’s left, and a projected timeline. The dates shown in the Gantt chart are not guaranteed. Added design rounds, high volumes of comments or tickets, and slow turnarounds on feedback rounds will push the dates out. We can only start discussing a launch date after you have completed your first round of QA testing.

Retainer

This refers to our post-launch services including hosting & maintenance, SEO, Google Ads management, content marketing, and other strategic services. There is no contract, you can pause or stop the engagement any time. The retainer is just the amount you agree to pay us each month for the work we do, which is invoiced the following month.

Scope

This is the project budget. It’s how much you paid, based on our estimated number of hours to complete the work. We regularly review project hours and may bring up issues that are increasing the hours in an unexpected way. We may also say that something is out of scope. This would be a request for something that wasn’t included in the contract, and isn’t work that’s included in our default design, development, SEO, or other areas. We will always explain why.