The clearest glossary of web design on the internet — the jargon web developers actually speak.
Each entry opens with how developers usually pronounce the term. Sometimes there is one correct pronunciation, sometimes there is not — we do not insist, we simply show how the words are said and written in practice. Pick whichever you like: you will be understood either way.
Angular
Angular is one of the best known JavaScript frameworks, developed by Google. In plain words, it is a set of ready-made building blocks that let developers put together complex, interactive interfaces…Backend
Backend is the part of a website the visitor never sees, and the part that actually makes it work. If a website were a ship, the backend would be the engine room. For practical purposes you can think…Bootstrap
Bootstrap is the most widely used CSS framework for building responsive websites. It is a set of ready-made CSS files you attach to your site to make it "mobile" quickly and reliably — that…CMS
CMS stands for Content Management System. In plain English — the engine of a website. It is the kind of software that lets you run a site without touching its code. Unlike ordinary programs, which…Django
Django is the best known framework for the Python programming language. Unlike popular content management systems such as WordPress or Drupal, Django is not meant for putting up a standard kind of…Drupal
Drupal is a content management system, and one of the three most widely used in the world. It is entirely free. To run it you need nothing more exotic than ordinary hosting with PHP and a MySQL or…Frontend
Frontend is the face of a website — everything the visitor sees and interacts with directly. It is the half of the work that makes the strongest visual impression, and the half people mean when they…Minification
Minification is a way of making a site faster by automatically shrinking the size of its HTML, CSS and JavaScript files. When developers write code, they try to keep it readable — that is, easy to…Open Source
Open Source is an idea about how software should be distributed — freely, in both senses of that word. You may reasonably ask what an idea has to do with building websites. This much: the…PHP
PHP is the most widespread programming language on the web. Every one of the popular content management systems — WordPress, Drupal, Joomla — is written in it, and it is the language hosting…Python
Python is a programming language less common in website building than PHP, but more often chosen for large projects and for ones where the cost of a mistake is high. In web development Python is…React
React is a JavaScript library for building modern website interfaces. It came out of Facebook and is developed with the backing of Instagram and a very large community of developers. There is no…Scrum
Scrum is one of the most popular ways of organising a team's work on a software project — website building included. There are several ways to arrange the working process on a site. Scrum is…SEO
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation. It is the collective name for everything done to a site to get it as high as possible in the results when somebody searches on Google, Bing or anywhere…Svelte
Svelte is an open-source component framework and language for building interfaces, created by Rich Harris. Unlike the traditional JavaScript libraries, Svelte is not a monolithic framework you import…SVG
SVG stands for Scalable Vector Graphics. It is a markup language rather like HTML, but for pictures. Files written in it carry the .svg extension and can be placed straight into a web page. Their…Vue
Vue is a JavaScript framework that follows the MVVM pattern, building interfaces through reactive data binding — when the data changes, the part of the page showing it updates by itself.