The words, defined plainly.
Every term we use on this site, explained without jargon, with a note on why it matters if you are responsible for a website. Search it, filter it, or read it end to end.
164 terms
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- 100ms budgetPerformance
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A 100 millisecond budget is the rough ceiling for how long an interface can take to respond before a person notices the delay.
It is the reason interaction handlers are kept off the main thread and animation is limited to transform and opacity. Anything slower reads as sluggish even when nothing is broken.
- 301 redirectWeb and frontend
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A 301 redirect is a permanent instruction telling browsers and search engines that a URL has moved to a new address.
Without one, a renamed page loses whatever ranking and inbound links it had, and anyone with the old link lands on a 404. Every legacy route on this site carries one.
Related404 pageCanonical URLSitemap
- 404 pageWeb and frontend
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A 404 page is what a site returns when the requested address does not exist.
Most are a dead end. A useful one names what was being looked for and offers the three routes people were most likely after, which turns a mistake into a navigation step.
A
- AccessibilityAccessibility
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Accessibility is designing and building so people using assistive technology, a keyboard, or a small screen in bright sunlight can complete the same tasks as everyone else.
It is a legal requirement in many markets and a procurement question in most enterprise deals. It is also cheaper to build in than to retrofit.
- AEOSearch and answer engines
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AEO, answer engine optimisation, is structuring a page so an AI assistant can find a specific claim, understand it and quote it correctly.
Assistants quote pages rather than ranking them. That rewards direct answers in plain sentences and punishes copy that only makes sense after three paragraphs of preamble.
RelatedGEOAIOSchemaDirect answer
How Creogen approaches this - AIOSearch and answer engines
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AIO, AI optimisation, is making sure a model that summarises your site gets it right, particularly about availability and scope.
The failure mode is a confident wrong claim. The defence is putting status in the same sentence as the capability, so a summary that keeps one keeps both.
RelatedAEOGEOHallucination
- Alt textAccessibility
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Alt text is the text alternative on an image, read aloud by screen readers and shown when an image fails to load.
Decorative images take an empty alt so they are skipped. Meaningful ones need a description of what they convey, not a filename. Writing it across a whole asset library by hand is why Assetflow exists.
RelatedAccessibilityScreen readerCMS
Assetflow - AnalyticsAnalytics
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Analytics is the collection and interpretation of data about how people use a site.
Most teams collect far more than they act on. A useful setup answers three questions you have already agreed matter, rather than measuring everything and deciding later.
- Anchor textSearch and answer engines
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Anchor text is the visible, clickable words in a link.
It tells both readers and engines what to expect on the other side. Read more, repeated forty times, tells neither of them anything.
- Answer engineSearch and answer engines
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An answer engine is any system that returns an answer rather than a list of links: a search summary, a chat assistant, a voice result.
Being quotable matters more than keyword density, because the system is extracting a claim rather than ranking a document.
RelatedAEOGEOLLMDirect answer
- APIWeb and frontend
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An API is a defined way for one piece of software to ask another for data or to do something, with a documented contract for the request and the response.
Every integration your site has runs through one. A stable API is the difference between a workflow that survives a platform update and one that quietly breaks.
- ARIAAccessibility
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ARIA is a set of attributes that describe roles, states and properties to assistive technology when native HTML cannot.
The first rule of ARIA is not to use it: a native button beats a div with a button role every time. It is for the gaps, not the defaults.
RelatedSemantic HTMLScreen readerAccessibilityKeyboard navigation
- AttributionAnalytics
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Attribution is deciding which touchpoints get credit for a conversion.
Every model is wrong in a different direction. Its main honest use is comparing periods with the same model, not settling arguments about channels.
RelatedAnalyticsFunnelConversion
- AuthenticationWeb and frontend
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Authentication is proving who is making a request. Authorisation, which follows it, is deciding what they are allowed to do.
- Automated testingWeb and frontend
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Automated testing is code that checks other code, run on every change rather than before a release.
It matters most for the things humans stop noticing: a link that broke, a heading level that skipped, a banned word that crept into copy. This site fails its own build on all three.
RelatedLintingRegression
B
- BackfillContent and CMS
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A backfill is populating a field across every existing record after that field is added, rather than only on new ones.
It is the unglamorous work that decides whether a CMS change is real. Add a field and skip the backfill and you have two classes of record forever.
- Bounce rateAnalytics
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Bounce rate is the share of visits where someone arrived and left without a second interaction.
On its own it says little: a visitor who got their answer immediately looks identical to one who gave up. It is only useful next to what they were trying to do.
RelatedAnalyticsConversionSession
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A breadcrumb is a trail showing where a page sits in the site structure, usually rendered near the top.
It helps orientation for people arriving from search, and its structured data form tells engines how your site is organised.
- Build stepWeb and frontend
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A build step is the process that turns source files into the files a browser actually receives.
It is where duplication gets removed. This site generates every page from data and partials, which is why one component change updates thirty pages instead of one.
RelatedStatic siteTemplating
- Buying intentCreoglyph
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Buying intent is one of the three signal types Creobot sorts a visitor question into: someone close to a decision, asking about implementation, pricing or a comparison.
It separates a browser from a buyer using their own words rather than a form fill or a page view.
RelatedContent gapObjectionSignal
Creobot
C
- Canonical factCreoglyph
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A canonical fact is a value that is stated authoritatively in exactly one place, and referenced rather than restated everywhere else it appears.
Two pages disagreeing about a price in front of a buyer is the most expensive ordinary failure a marketing site has. Deciding which page owns each fact is what prevents it, and it costs an hour before anybody writes a page.
When you notice itWhen somebody asks which number is right and the answer requires opening three tabs.
The common mistakeTreating it as a tidiness exercise. It is a decision about ownership, and it has to be made before content exists, because retrofitting it onto forty pages that each typed the number is a cleanup rather than a decision.
RelatedSource of truthReference fieldCanonical URLContent decay
- Canonical URLSearch and answer engines
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A canonical URL is the address you are declaring as the real one for a page, when the same content is reachable at more than one.
Without it, two URLs compete with each other and split whatever authority the page has earned.
- Care planProduct
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A care plan is an agency retainer covering ongoing website work after launch.
Most are sold on trust and reported on with a list of tasks completed. The gap between that and evidence of improvement is the space Creogen is aimed at.
RelatedRetainerWebsite operationsWhite label
Partner programme - ChunkingAI and data
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Chunking is splitting a document into pieces small enough to retrieve and pass to a model, while keeping each piece coherent on its own.
Chunk badly and retrieval returns fragments that answer nothing. It is the least discussed and most decisive step in a retrieval system.
- CitationSearch and answer engines
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A citation is a visible statement of where a claim came from, in a form a reader or an answer engine can follow.
Answer engines summarise rather than list, so being the source a summary names is worth more than being one of ten links. A page whose claims have visible origins is more likely to be the source that gets named.
When you notice itWhen a competitor keeps being quoted for a fact your site also states, and their version says where the number came from.
The common mistakeAdding a source line to soft claims that were never checkable. A citation on an unfalsifiable statement reads as decoration and undermines the citations that are real.
- CLSPerformance
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CLS, cumulative layout shift, measures how much visible content moves around while a page is loading.
It is the metric behind the experience of reaching for a button and having it jump. Reserving space for images, embeds and fonts removes almost all of it.
- CMSContent and CMS
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A CMS, content management system, stores structured content separately from the pages that display it.
The separation is the point: change the content once and every page built from it updates. It is also where most site rot begins, because structure gets added and never maintained.
- CMS operationsCreoglyph
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CMS operations is the work of keeping structured content correct at scale: collections, fields, bulk edits and backfills.
It scales badly by hand, which is why it is the first thing postponed and the last thing done.
RelatedCMSBackfillCollectionWebsite operations
Creogen - CollectionWebflow and no-code
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A collection is a set of CMS records sharing the same fields, such as every blog post or every case study.
Getting the fields right early is cheaper than restructuring later, because every page and every filter is built against them.
- ComponentWebflow and no-code
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A component is a reusable block of layout and styling that can be placed many times and edited in one place.
It is what makes a design system real rather than aspirational. Without components, consistency depends on everyone remembering.
- ConsentProduct
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Consent is a person's informed agreement to something being done with their data, given freely and revocably.
Pre-ticked boxes and a cookie banner with no reject button are not consent, and in several markets they are now enforcement matters.
RelatedDark patternAnalyticsPrivacy
- Content decayContent and CMS
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Content decay is a page losing traffic and accuracy over time as the subject moves on and the page does not.
Every site has it. Few have a process for finding it, which is why the average blog is a museum with a publish button.
RelatedEvergreen contentContent operationsWebsite operations
- Content gapCreoglyph
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A content gap is a question a visitor asked that the site never answered.
It is the most useful thing an assistant finds, because a gap on record is a page you can go and write. Most sites lose these to a closed chat window.
RelatedBuying intentObjectionSignal
Creobot - Content operationCreoglyph
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A content operation is one recorded change to a named page, carrying the reason it was made, what it was expected to cause, and a check on whether it did.
It is the unit that makes website work reportable. Hours and tickets describe effort; a content operation describes what is different about the site and why, which is the only thing a client or a founder can evaluate.
When you notice itWhen a monthly report lists activity and nobody can name a page that is better than it was.
The common mistakeRecording the change and not the reason. A change log without reasons cannot tell you what to stop doing, which is most of its value.
RelatedExpectationEvidence recordWebsite operationsContinuous audit
- Content operationsContent and CMS
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Content operations is the practice of running content as a system: who writes it, how it is structured, how it is reviewed, and how it is kept correct after publication.
Most teams have a publishing process and no maintenance process, which is why a site is most accurate on launch day.
- Continuous auditCreoglyph
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A continuous audit is checking a site on every change rather than once before a review.
Findings tied to a URL and grouped by type, with the fix opening beside the finding. That last part is the only reason anyone ever closes one.
RelatedWebsite operationsLighthouseCore Web Vitals
Creogen - Continuous integrationWeb and frontend
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Continuous integration is running the build and its checks automatically on every change, before anything reaches production.
It is where a linter earns its keep: the check runs whether or not anyone remembered to run it.
- Contrast ratioAccessibility
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Contrast ratio measures the difference in luminance between text and its background, expressed as a ratio.
WCAG AA asks for 4.5:1 on body text and 3:1 on large text. It is measurable, so it is not a matter of taste, though it is often argued about as if it were.
- ConversionProduct
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A conversion is a visitor completing an action the site was built to produce: a booking, a signup, a qualified enquiry.
Rate alone is misleading without volume and quality. Doubling a rate by halving the traffic that reaches the page is not a win.
- Conversion rateAnalytics
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Conversion rate is the share of visitors who complete a defined action.
Useful only when the denominator is stated. A 12% rate on a pricing page and on a homepage are not comparable numbers.
- Core Web VitalsPerformance
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Core Web Vitals are Google's field measurements of loading, interactivity and visual stability: LCP, INP and CLS.
- Crawl budgetSearch and answer engines
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Crawl budget is the practical limit on how much of your site a search engine will fetch in a given period.
It only becomes a real constraint on large sites, where thin generated pages consume attention that should go to the pages that matter.
- CSSWeb and frontend
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CSS is the language that describes how HTML should be presented: layout, colour, type, spacing, motion.
Modern CSS does work that used to need JavaScript, including layout, animation and container based responsiveness, which usually means less code and better performance.
- Custom attributeWebflow and no-code
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A custom attribute is a key and value pair set on an element, used for scripts, accessibility and integrations.
Setting them one element at a time through a panel is why bulk attribute tooling exists.
RelatedHTMLSemantic HTMLARIA
Attriflow
D
- Dark patternDesign and UX
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A dark pattern is an interface choice that gets a person to do something they did not intend, such as a disguised opt in or a hard to find cancel.
Beyond the ethics, they are now regulated in several markets, and they produce customers who leave angry rather than customers who stay.
RelatedUX designConversionConsent
- Design systemDesign and UX
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A design system is the shared set of tokens, components and rules a product is built from, along with the guidance for using them.
A component library without the rules is a folder. The rules are what stop the tenth page drifting from the first.
- Design tokenDesign and UX
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A design token is a named value for a design decision: a colour, a spacing step, a radius, a duration.
Naming a value once means changing it once. It also makes drift visible: an off scale spacing value is a build failure on this site rather than a matter of taste.
- Direct answerSearch and answer engines
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A direct answer is a passage near the top of a page that states the answer to the page's question in complete sentences.
It is what an answer engine can quote and what an impatient reader is looking for. Burying it below context serves neither.
RelatedAEOGEOFeatured snippet
- DiscoveryProduct
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Discovery is the work of understanding a problem before committing to a solution, through research, data and conversation.
Skipping it is how teams ship a beautifully built answer to a question nobody asked.
- Duplicate contentSearch and answer engines
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Duplicate content is the same or near identical content reachable at more than one URL.
It splits authority and forces engines to guess which version to show. Canonicals resolve it. Generating hundreds of near identical pages creates it.
E
- Edge functionWeb and frontend
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An edge function is server side code that runs in a data centre close to the visitor rather than in one central region.
It gives a static site the few dynamic things it genuinely needs, such as a form endpoint, without a server to maintain.
RelatedServerlessStatic siteAPI
- Editorial workflowContent and CMS
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An editorial workflow is the agreed path a piece of content takes from idea to published and reviewed.
Most teams have a path to published and nothing after it, which is why accuracy peaks on the day something goes live.
- EmbeddingAI and data
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An embedding is a numeric representation of text that places similar meanings close together, so similarity can be measured mathematically.
It is what lets a system find the passage that answers a question phrased in words the document never used.
- Empty stateDesign and UX
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An empty state is what an interface shows when there is nothing to show yet: no results, no records, nothing configured.
It is where a product either teaches you what to do next or leaves you staring at a blank panel. Designing it last is why so many are blank panels.
- EntitySearch and answer engines
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An entity is a thing with an identity of its own, separate from any page that happens to describe it.
Modelling a site around entities rather than pages is what lets a machine answer questions that span pages. Which plans include a feature, or which integrations exist, are unanswerable in a page model and are lookups in an entity model.
When you notice itWhen a question a buyer asks constantly cannot be answered from the site by anything except a person reading several pages.
The common mistakeAssuming an entity needs its own page. Many do not. The point is that it has an identity a page can reference, not that it gets a URL.
- Error messageDesign and UX
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An error message tells someone what went wrong and what to do about it.
The useful ones name the field, say what was expected, and avoid blaming the person. Something went wrong is not an error message, it is an apology.
- Evergreen contentContent and CMS
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Evergreen content stays useful long after publication because it explains something that does not change quickly.
It compounds while news content decays, but only if someone reviews it. Evergreen is a plan, not a property.
- Evidence recordCreoglyph
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An evidence record is the stored account of what was checked, when it was checked, and what the check found.
It is the difference between believing a change helped and being able to show it. It also turns a repeated failure into a visible pattern rather than a series of unconnected incidents.
When you notice itAt a renewal or a review, when the work is real and there is nothing to point at.
The common mistakeKeeping only the failures. A record with no passes in it cannot tell you when something started going wrong, only that it is wrong now.
RelatedExpectationValidation resultRecurrenceContinuous audit
- ExpectationCreoglyph
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An expectation is a sentence written before a change ships, stating what the change should cause, in terms somebody could check without a dashboard.
Without one, every outcome can be read as a success, because the thing it was supposed to do was never recorded. It is the cheapest change available to how a team works and the one most often skipped.
When you notice itSix weeks after a change, when somebody asks whether it worked and the honest answer is that nobody can tell.
The common mistakeWriting it as a metric target. As soon as the record says conversion will rise by some figure, it becomes a number to defend rather than a claim to examine, and the honest outcomes stop being recorded.
RelatedContent operationEvidence recordAttributionWebsite operations
F
- Featured snippetSearch and answer engines
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A featured snippet is the extracted answer some search engines show above the normal results.
Winning one usually comes from answering a question plainly in a short, well structured passage rather than from ranking first.
RelatedDirect answerAEOSchema
- Focus orderAccessibility
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Focus order is the sequence in which interactive elements receive keyboard focus as a person tabs through a page.
When it does not match the visual order, keyboard users get lost. It is the single most common defect found in a real keyboard pass.
- Focus visibleAccessibility
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Focus visible is the indicator showing which element currently has keyboard focus.
Removing outlines because they look untidy makes a site unusable without a mouse. Replace them with something better, never with nothing.
RelatedFocus orderAccessibilityWCAG
- FunnelProduct
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A funnel is the sequence of steps between someone arriving and someone converting, measured at each step.
Useful for finding where people stop. Misleading when it implies a single path, because most real journeys involve leaving and coming back.
G
- GEOSearch and answer engines
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GEO, generative engine optimisation, is being present and correctly represented inside generated answers rather than only in a list of links.
It leans on being specific and quotable. Vague marketing copy has nothing a model can safely extract.
- GroundingAI and data
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Grounding is constraining a model's answer to material you supplied, rather than to whatever it absorbed during training.
It is the difference between an assistant that quotes your documentation and one that invents a feature you do not sell.
- GuardrailAI and data
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A guardrail is a constraint on what a system may output or do, enforced outside the model rather than requested in a prompt.
A prompt is a suggestion. A guardrail is code that refuses. Anything that can publish to a live site needs the second kind.
H
- HallucinationAI and data
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A hallucination is a model stating something false with the same confidence it states something true.
It is not a bug to be patched but a property to be designed around, which is why grounding and validation matter more than prompt wording.
- Heading hierarchyAccessibility
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Heading hierarchy is the nested order of h1 to h6 that describes a document's structure.
Screen reader users navigate by it. Skipping a level breaks the outline, and it is trivial to check automatically, which is why this site fails its build on it.
- Helper textContent and CMS
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Helper text is the short note under a CMS field explaining what the field is for and what good input looks like.
Absent on most collections, which is why the same field gets filled three different ways by three different people.
RelatedCMSCollectionContent operations
AI CMS Helper Text - HTMLWeb and frontend
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HTML is the language that describes the structure and meaning of web content: headings, paragraphs, lists, links, forms.
Choosing the element that matches the meaning gives you accessibility, keyboard behaviour and machine readability without writing any code for them.
- Human in the loopAI and data
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Human in the loop means a person reviews and approves an automated action before it takes effect.
For anything that publishes to a live marketing site, it is the difference between assistance and an incident.
I
- IdempotencyWeb and frontend
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An operation is idempotent when performing it twice produces the same result as performing it once. The usual mechanism is a key supplied by the client and stored against the result, so a repeat returns the original outcome rather than acting again.
Networks time out and clients retry, so any write that can be issued twice will be. Without idempotency a retry produces a duplicate, and on a content system that means two entries in the change history, two webhook deliveries and a confused user.
When you notice itAfter an interrupted operation is resumed and the items that already succeeded are written again.
The common mistakeInferring the key from the content. Two records can legitimately end up with the same values, so the key has to be generated rather than derived.
Technical noteWhen the same key arrives with a different body, that is a client bug. Returning the original result silently hides it; returning a conflict surfaces it where somebody can fix it.
- Immutable spanContent and CMS
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An immutable span is text on a page that may not be changed without a named approver, marked as such in the source rather than remembered by whoever was in the room.
Every site has sentences that look like ordinary prose and are not: wording a lawyer approved, a number finance signed off, a product name that was argued about. Nothing marks them, so an editor or an automated system treats them like any other sentence.
When you notice itWhen approved wording has quietly changed and nobody can say when or who did it.
The common mistakeRecording the constraint in a style guide. A guide is enforced on whoever read it, which after the first year is nobody. A field on the record is enforced on everybody.
RelatedPermission scopeCanonical factGuardrailReview workflow
- Information architectureDesign and UX
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Information architecture is how content is organised, labelled and related so people can find what they came for.
Most navigation problems are architecture problems wearing a menu. Renaming links rarely fixes a structure that does not match how people think.
RelatedNavigationTaxonomyBreadcrumb
- INPPerformance
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INP, interaction to next paint, measures how quickly a page responds visibly after someone interacts with it.
It replaced first input delay because it measures every interaction, not just the first, which is closer to how a page actually feels.
- Internal linkingSearch and answer engines
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Internal linking is connecting your own pages to each other with descriptive links.
It tells engines which pages matter and gives readers a next step. It is the cheapest structural improvement available to most sites.
J
- JavaScriptWeb and frontend
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JavaScript is the language that makes web pages interactive, running in the browser and increasingly on servers too.
How much of it you ship is a design decision with real consequences: every kilobyte is parsed and executed on devices far slower than the one it was written on.
- Jobs to be doneProduct
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Jobs to be done is a way of describing what someone is trying to accomplish, independent of the product they use to do it.
It moves the conversation from features to outcomes, and it explains why your real competitor is often a spreadsheet.
- JSON-LDSearch and answer engines
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JSON-LD is the format used to embed structured data in a page as a script block, separate from the visible markup.
Being separate is convenient and dangerous: it is easy to describe content the page does not actually show, which is a penalty risk.
RelatedSchemaStructured dataSEO
K
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Keyboard navigation is operating an interface entirely with a keyboard, without a mouse or touch.
L
- LCPPerformance
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LCP, largest contentful paint, measures when the largest visible element in the viewport has rendered.
It is usually a hero image, a heading or a video poster. Fixing it is normally about what loads first, not about total page weight.
RelatedCore Web VitalsCLSINP
- LighthousePerformance
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Lighthouse is an auditing tool that scores a page on performance, accessibility, best practices and SEO in a controlled environment.
Useful for catching regressions. Not the same as field data, because it runs on a simulated device rather than a real visitor's phone.
- LintingWeb and frontend
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Linting is automatically checking source files against rules before they ship.
It works best on things humans stop noticing. This site's linter fails the build on a missing alt attribute, a skipped heading level or a banned word.
RelatedAutomated testingBuild step
- LLMAI and data
-
An LLM, large language model, is a model trained on very large amounts of text to predict and generate language.
It is a capable component and a poor system on its own. What it is connected to, constrained by and checked against decides whether it is useful.
M
- Main threadPerformance
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The main thread is where a browser runs JavaScript, calculates layout and paints the page. It can only do one thing at a time.
Blocking it is why a page can look ready and refuse to respond. It is the reason animation is restricted to properties that skip layout.
- ManifestCreoglyph
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A manifest is a record of what each page is and what points at it: its identity, its fields, which of them are fixed, which pages link to it and with what anchor text, and which components render which field.
It converts every downstream check from a search into a lookup. Asking whether an edit invalidates an anchor text somewhere is unbounded without one and instant with one.
When you notice itWhen a change breaks something in a place nobody recorded a dependency on, and finding it is an afternoon.
The common mistakeBuilding the editing capability first. The editor demos well and the manifest does not, so the ordering is usually wrong, and then the manifest gets built anyway under pressure with an incident attached.
Technical noteMost of it is derivable from a site you already have. It is a crawl, a parse and a join, and it is an afternoon rather than a project for a few hundred pages.
RelatedEntityCanonical factInternal linkingWebsite operations
- Meta descriptionSearch and answer engines
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A meta description is the summary a page offers for use in search results.
It does not affect ranking directly but it decides whether anyone clicks. Writing one per page is tedious and worth it.
RelatedTitle tagSERPOpen Graph
- MicrocopyDesign and UX
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Microcopy is the small text inside an interface: labels, hints, button text, error messages, empty states.
It carries more of the experience than the headline does, and it is usually written last by whoever is nearest.
N
-
Navigation is the set of controls that let someone move between the parts of a site.
- No-codeWebflow and no-code
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No-code describes tools that let people build working software through a visual interface instead of writing code.
It changed who can ship a website. It did not change the fact that someone has to maintain it afterwards.
- NoindexSearch and answer engines
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Noindex is an instruction telling search engines not to include a page in their index.
Correct for utility pages such as app callbacks. Note that a page blocked in robots.txt cannot be read, so its noindex is never seen.
O
- OAuthWeb and frontend
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OAuth is a standard that lets an application act on your behalf in another service without receiving your password.
It is what an app install flow runs on. When an install fails, the failure is usually somewhere in this handshake.
RelatedAuthenticationAPIWebhook
- ObjectionCreoglyph
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An objection is one of the three signal types: the reason a visitor hesitates, said to a chat box rather than to a salesperson.
It is usually the only place it gets said at all, which makes it the most valuable and least collected thing on a website.
RelatedContent gapBuying intentSignal
Creobot - OnboardingProduct
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Onboarding is the path from someone's first use to their first real result.
It is judged on time to that first result, not on how many steps were explained. Most onboarding teaches the product instead of producing the outcome.
- Open GraphSearch and answer engines
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Open Graph is the set of tags describing how a page should appear when shared on social platforms: title, description, image.
Without them the platform guesses, and it usually guesses badly. One correctly sized image per key page is a small job with a visible payoff.
- Optimistic concurrencyWeb and frontend
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Optimistic concurrency lets two people work on the same record without locking it, and detects a conflict at write time by carrying a version indicator from the read into the write. That carried value is the version precondition.
On a hosted CMS there is usually no lock available, so this is the only defence against one person's edit silently destroying another's. Silently is the important word, because the loser finds out weeks later.
When you notice itWhen a change somebody made disappears and nobody can connect it to anything.
The common mistakeTreating a version mismatch as an error to retry past. It is a state that needs a person: here is what it says now, here is what we were going to set, which do you want.
P
- Partial writeWeb and frontend
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A partial write is what you have when a long operation is interrupted part of the way through. The remedy is a resumable operation: a sequence of individually completed steps with a recorded position, rather than one action assumed to finish.
Any operation long enough to be interrupted sometimes is. The question is not whether it happens but whether the system knows exactly how far it got, because forty seven of ninety succeeded is usable and something went wrong is not.
When you notice itWhen a bulk edit stops and nobody can say which records changed without checking every one.
The common mistakeRecording results only at the end. If the process dies first, everything already known about what succeeded is lost, and the retry starts from zero and duplicates work.
- Performance budgetPerformance
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A performance budget is an agreed limit on page weight, request count or a specific metric, checked automatically.
Without one, performance is everyone's concern and nobody's decision. With one, adding a heavy script becomes a conversation.
- Permission scopeWeb and frontend
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A permission scope is the narrowest set of things a credential is allowed to touch. On a content system the useful granularity is per field rather than per endpoint, which is what field level permission means.
Endpoint level access means granting a process the ability to change a price when it only needed to draft a paragraph. That gap is behind most of the worst incidents involving automated writes to a content system.
When you notice itThe first time something automated is given write access and somebody asks what exactly it can change.
The common mistakeRequesting the permissions the roadmap will eventually need. An install is a decision about the next ninety seconds by somebody who does not know you yet.
- PositioningProduct
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Positioning is the place a product occupies in a buyer's mind relative to the alternatives they are already considering.
It is decided by the comparison you invite. Get it wrong and every conversation starts with the customer arguing about the wrong category.
- PrivacyProduct
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Privacy is how personal data is collected, stored, used and eventually deleted, and what people are told about it.
It is a design constraint rather than a legal appendix. Deciding not to collect something is the cheapest privacy measure available.
- Product strategyProduct
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Product strategy is the set of choices about who you serve, what you will not build, and how the parts fit together.
A roadmap is not a strategy. A roadmap says what is next. A strategy says why those things and not the twenty others.
- Progressive enhancementWeb and frontend
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Progressive enhancement is building so the core experience works with basic capabilities, then layering on improvements where they are supported.
It is why the FAQ on this site opens without JavaScript and why the glossary shows every definition before any script runs.
- ProvenanceAI and data
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Provenance is the record of which retrieved material supported which specific claim in a generated answer.
It is what makes a generated answer checkable before it is published. Without it you can tell that a model used your content and not whether a particular sentence came from anywhere at all.
When you notice itWhen an answer is confidently wrong and there is no way to establish where the wrong part came from.
The common mistakeConfusing it with a citation. Provenance is internal and is used to verify before publishing. A citation is what a reader sees. A system can have provenance and show no citations, and it can show citations with no provenance behind them.
- pSEOSearch and answer engines
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pSEO, programmatic SEO, is generating many pages from structured data through a shared template.
Done well, each page answers something specific and earns its URL. Done badly it produces hundreds of near identical pages, which engines have penalised for years.
- Pull quoteDesign and UX
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A pull quote is a short excerpt set apart from the body text to give the eye somewhere to rest and to signal the argument.
In long form, it does structural work rather than decorative work: it tells a scanning reader what the section is about.
RelatedTypographyReadability
R
- RAGAI and data
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RAG, retrieval augmented generation, is retrieving relevant passages from your own material and giving them to a model so its answer is based on them.
It is the practical way to get an assistant that answers about your product rather than about the internet's idea of your product.
RelatedGroundingEmbeddingChunkingVector database
Creobot - Rate limitWeb and frontend
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A rate limit caps how many requests a client may make in a period.
Sensible on any public endpoint. The error reporter on this site's app failure pages is limited to two reports per day per browser for the same reason.
RelatedAPIAuthentication
- ReadabilityDesign and UX
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Readability is how easily a person can take in text, decided by line length, line height, contrast, type size and structure.
Roughly 60 to 75 characters per line is the usual comfortable range. Full width body text on a wide monitor is the most common violation.
- Reason codeCreoglyph
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A reason code is a short, stable, machine readable value saying why an operation was refused or a check failed.
It is what turns a refusal into information. A system that refuses with a code can be measured over time, so you can see whether refusals are shifting from correctness problems toward scope problems, which is what a working guardrail looks like.
When you notice itWhen the same failure has been happening for weeks and nobody can say how often, because the only record is a message string.
The common mistakeMaking the code a sentence. It has to be stable enough that consumers can branch on it and you will not edit it, which a human readable message never is.
- RecurrenceCreoglyph
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A recurrence is a finding that has come back after being closed, which is a different and more useful fact than a finding that has just been discovered.
A recurrence tells you the cause was misdiagnosed. A discovery tells you only that something is wrong now. Over a few quarters the recurrence list is the more informative half of an audit record.
When you notice itAt the second audit, when it finds mostly the same things the first one did.
The common mistakeStoring findings as prose. Two paragraphs written six months apart by different people have no relationship, so recurrence is invisible and the same knowledge gets bought twice.
RelatedEvidence recordContinuous auditContent decayValidation result
- Reference fieldWeb and frontend
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A reference field stores a pointer to the record that owns a value, rather than a copy of the value itself.
It is what makes a rename one edit instead of a site wide search. Product names, plan limits and prices all exist independently of the pages that mention them, and every copy is a future disagreement.
When you notice itWhen a product is renamed and somebody spends a day finding every page that typed the old name.
The common mistakeUsing text because the editing interface is nicer. That is a solvable interface problem, whereas a site where one fact is typed in forty places is not solvable at all.
- RegressionWeb and frontend
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A regression is something that used to work and no longer does, usually as a side effect of an unrelated change.
They are found by checks that run every time rather than by memory. Every structural bug fixed on this site left behind a check that fails if it returns.
- Reserved spacePerformance
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Reserved space is declaring an element's dimensions before its content arrives, so nothing shifts when it loads.
Width and height on every image, and a fixed ratio on every embed. It is most of what CLS measures.
RelatedCLSCore Web VitalsLCP
- Responsive designDesign and UX
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Responsive design is building one interface that adapts to the space it is given rather than shipping separate versions.
Modern CSS does most of it with layout rather than breakpoints. Overflow at a narrow width is the most common defect and the easiest to measure.
RelatedCSSDesign tokenReadability
- RESTWeb and frontend
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REST is a common style of API design built around addressable resources and standard HTTP methods.
- RetainerProduct
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A retainer is a recurring fee for ongoing work rather than a fee for a defined project.
It is the healthiest revenue an agency has and the hardest to defend at renewal, because the value is spread thin across many small acts.
RelatedCare planWebsite operationsWhite label
Partner programme - RetrievalAI and data
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Retrieval is the step that finds the most relevant passages for a question before a model writes an answer.
Answer quality is usually decided here rather than in the model. Bad retrieval cannot be rescued by a better prompt.
- Review stateContent and CMS
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A review state records whether a person has looked at an item and what they decided: new, triaged, actioned or dismissed, with a reason on the dismissals.
Without it, every visit to a list starts from scratch and the same low value items get re evaluated every time. After about three visits people stop opening the list.
When you notice itWhen somebody asks whether a known issue was decided against or simply missed, and there is no way to tell.
The common mistakeAllowing a dismissal with no reason. A dismissal without one is indistinguishable from an oversight and will be argued about again.
RelatedStructured signalEvidence recordEditorial workflowHuman in the loop
- Review workflowContent and CMS
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A review workflow is the agreed process for checking work before it goes live, and who has the final say.
For anything generated, it is the difference between assistance and an incident. The useful version names a person, not a stage.
- Robots.txtSearch and answer engines
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Robots.txt is a file telling crawlers which parts of a site they should not fetch.
It controls crawling, not indexing. Blocking a page there can leave it indexed with no description, which is worse than either outcome.
RelatedSitemapCrawl budgetNoindex
- Run idWeb and frontend
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A run id is an identifier generated at the start of an operation and carried through everything it touches, so one execution can be reconstructed afterwards.
It is the cheapest debugging affordance available. A support conversation that begins with a run id is a different conversation from one that begins with a description of what somebody was trying to do.
When you notice itDuring an incident, when correlating timestamps across three logs is the only way to find out what happened.
The common mistakeRecording it in logs and never surfacing it to the user. It has to appear in the response, in the log and on any error a person sees, or it cannot connect the two.
S
- SchemaSearch and answer engines
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Schema is structured data in a page describing what the content is: an organisation, a product, a set of questions.
It has to match what is visible. Schema describing content a visitor cannot see is a penalty waiting to happen.
RelatedJSON-LDStructured dataAEO
- Screen readerAccessibility
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A screen reader is software that reads an interface aloud, used by people who are blind or have low vision.
It exposes structure rather than layout, which is why semantic markup and heading order matter more than visual arrangement.
- Semantic HTMLWeb and frontend
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Semantic HTML means using the element that matches the meaning of the content: a button for a button, a heading for a heading.
It gives keyboard behaviour, accessibility and machine readability for free. A div with a click handler gives you none of them.
- Semantic searchAI and data
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Semantic search finds results by meaning rather than by matching words.
It is why a good assistant can answer a question phrased in words your documentation never used.
- SEOSearch and answer engines
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SEO, search engine optimisation, is the practice of making a site more likely to be found and correctly represented in search results.
It has quietly split into optimising for ranked links and optimising for generated answers. Most advice still assumes the first.
RelatedAEOGEOSchemaInternal linking
- SERPSearch and answer engines
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A SERP is a search engine results page: the mix of links, snippets, generated answers and other panels returned for a query.
What it contains for your key queries decides what winning even looks like. A page one link below a generated answer is a different outcome than it was five years ago.
- ServerlessWeb and frontend
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Serverless describes running code without managing a server, where the platform starts it on demand and bills for what runs.
For a static marketing site it is usually the only backend needed: a form endpoint, a webhook receiver, nothing to patch.
RelatedEdge functionAPIStatic site
- SessionAnalytics
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A session is a group of one person's interactions with a site within a time window.
Useful as a unit of behaviour, misleading as a unit of people. One person on three devices is three sessions and one buyer.
- SignalCreoglyph
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A signal is a visitor question after it has been typed as a content gap, buying intent or an objection. Its stored form, with a schema, is a structured signal.
It is the unit Creobot hands to Creogen, and the reason the pair is more useful than either product alone.
When you notice itWhen a list of collected questions is long enough that nobody can say which ones matter.
RelatedStructured signalContent gapBuying intentObjectionWebsite operations
- SitemapSearch and answer engines
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A sitemap is a file listing the URLs you want engines to know about, with optional hints about change frequency and priority.
It does not guarantee indexing. It does make discovery reliable on a large site, and it makes an accidental orphan page obvious.
- Slug historyWeb and frontend
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A slug history is the record of addresses a piece of content has had, kept so that an old one resolves to the current entity rather than returning a 404.
Slugs change because somebody finds a better one, and every consumer that stored the old address is then pointing at nothing. From the system's side it looks like a deletion and a creation; from theirs their data is broken.
When you notice itAfter a rename, when inbound links and caches start returning not found for content that still exists.
The common mistakeUsing the slug as the identifier in the first place. Keep an opaque immutable id as the key and treat the slug as a mutable attribute with a history.
-
A social preview is the card shown when a link is shared: image, title and description.
It is often the first impression of a page, and it is the one nobody checks. One correctly sized image per key page fixes most of it.
- Source of truthProduct
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A source of truth is the system that owns a class of values, so that anything else holding them is a copy that can be wrong.
It decides where a correction has to be made. If finance owns pricing and the CMS holds a free text price field, the site can disagree with the company without anybody doing something wrong.
When you notice itWhen a change is made in one system and somebody has to remember to make it again somewhere else.
The common mistakeNaming a source of truth and then leaving the copies editable. A copy that can be edited independently is a second source of truth whatever the policy says.
- Spacing scaleDesign and UX
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A spacing scale is the fixed set of spacing values a design system permits.
It stops the slow drift where every new section invents its own gap. On this site an off scale value fails the build.
- StalenessCreoglyph
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Staleness is how far behind reality a stored observation has fallen, measured from when it was taken rather than from when it was read.
Anything reasoning about a website is reasoning about a snapshot. Without a recorded observation time, a system cannot tell whether it is acting on what the page says now or on what it said an hour ago.
When you notice itWhen an automated change is correct against a version of the page that no longer exists.
The common mistakeSetting one staleness tolerance for the whole system. Reading a page to summarise it can tolerate hours; writing to it cannot tolerate minutes, because somebody else may be editing.
Technical noteA tolerance belongs to an operation type rather than to a system, and it should be recorded next to the operation rather than configured globally.
RelatedContent decayContinuous auditValidation resultContent operation
- Static siteWeb and frontend
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A static site serves prebuilt files rather than generating each page on request.
Fast, cheap and hard to break, with the trade that anything dynamic has to come from an API or an edge function.
- Streaming responseAI and data
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A streaming response delivers a generated answer progressively rather than all at once, so first useful content arrives in a few hundred milliseconds instead of after several seconds.
It improves the wait a person expects to have and creates one they do not. Each chunk triggers a DOM update, so a naive implementation renders dozens of times a second on the same thread that handles scrolling.
When you notice itWhen an answer appears quickly and the page stutters while it does, and users report that as slow.
The common mistakeTreating streaming as the optimisation and stopping there. Batch chunks into animation frames and append to a single node, or you have traded a wait for jank.
- Structured dataSearch and answer engines
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Structured data is machine readable information about a page's content, added in a standard vocabulary.
- Structured signalCreoglyph
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A structured signal is the stored form of a visitor question: the raw text kept verbatim, plus a normalised phrasing, a group, an intent, a source page, a confidence, an observation time and a review state.
Free text does not aggregate. Until a question has a shape you cannot count how many people asked it, sort by it, or tell whether it stopped being asked after you changed a page.
When you notice itWhen a list of collected questions has become a transcript nobody reads.
The common mistakeClassifying at collection time and discarding the raw text. The classification scheme will change, and without raw there is nothing to reprocess, so every improvement applies only to what comes next.
Technical noteConfidence should describe the classification, not the answer. Those are separate properties and conflating them produces a number nobody can interpret.
- Style guideDesign and UX
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A style guide documents how a brand or product should look and sound: type, colour, spacing, tone.
It is only useful if it is the same source the product is built from. A guide that drifts from the code is documentation of the past.
T
- TaxonomyContent and CMS
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A taxonomy is the set of categories and tags used to classify content, and the rules for applying them.
Most taxonomies fail from generosity: too many tags, applied inconsistently, until filtering by one returns everything or nothing.
- TemplateWebflow and no-code
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A template is the shared layout a set of pages is generated from.
Fixing a template fixes every page built on it, which is why performance and accessibility are worth tracking at template level rather than page level.
- TemplatingWeb and frontend
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Templating is generating pages by combining a layout with data, rather than writing each page by hand.
It is what makes a thirty page site maintainable and a three hundred page site possible. It also means one template defect is a site wide defect.
- Thin contentSearch and answer engines
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Thin content is a page with little substance of its own, often generated from a template with a few words swapped.
It is the failure mode of programmatic SEO and the reason engines penalise it. The test is whether the page answers something specific.
- Title tagSearch and answer engines
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The title tag is the page title used in browser tabs, search results and shared links.
One per page, unique, describing that page rather than the company. Duplicated titles across a site are a common and cheap fix.
- Twitter cardSearch and answer engines
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A Twitter card is the metadata controlling how a link appears when shared on X.
It overlaps with Open Graph and falls back to it, but the summary type and image dimensions differ enough to be worth setting explicitly.
- TypographyDesign and UX
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Typography is the selection and setting of type: family, size, weight, spacing, line height and hierarchy.
On a text heavy site it is most of the design. Getting scale and rhythm right does more for perceived quality than any decorative element.
U
- UI designDesign and UX
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UI design is the visual and interactive surface: layout, type, colour, spacing, states and motion.
It is where trust is formed in the first seconds and where inconsistency is noticed even when it cannot be named.
- Usability testingDesign and UX
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Usability testing is watching people attempt real tasks with your interface and recording where they struggle.
Five people find most of the serious problems. The hard part is watching without helping.
- User researchDesign and UX
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User research is structured investigation into what people need, how they behave and why, through interviews, observation and data.
It is how you avoid building a confident answer to a question nobody asked. It is also the first thing cut under deadline.
- UX designDesign and UX
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UX design is shaping the whole experience of using something: the flow, the structure, the language and the recovery from mistakes.
It is decided by the boring parts far more than the visible ones: what happens when a field is wrong, when there is nothing yet, when the network fails.
- UX writingDesign and UX
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UX writing is the words inside an interface, written to help someone act rather than to describe a product.
A clear error message prevents more support tickets than a redesign. It is the highest use writing in any product.
V
- ValidationAI and data
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Validation is checking generated output against rules before it is allowed to take effect.
For anything that publishes to a live site it is not optional. Schema that does not match the page, a broken link, a heading level skipped: all of it is checkable before publication.
- Validation resultCreoglyph
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A validation result is what a check returns: a verdict, a reason code when it fails, and enough evidence to show why.
A check that returns only pass or fail cannot be acted on or measured. The reason is what tells you whether to block, re observe, or route to a person, and those have completely different costs.
When you notice itWhen validation starts rejecting most of what it sees and the only way to find out why is to read the output by hand.
The common mistakeTreating every failure the same way. A cluster of failures on one reason code is almost always an upstream problem, and loosening the threshold ships that problem instead of fixing it.
- Vector databaseAI and data
-
A vector database stores embeddings and finds the nearest matches to a query quickly.
It is the retrieval half of a RAG system. Choosing one matters less than chunking well and evaluating whether retrieval is returning the right passages.
W
- WCAGAccessibility
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WCAG, the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, is the standard defining how to make web content accessible, in levels A, AA and AAA.
AA is the level most procurement processes ask for. Contrast, heading order, labels, alt text, focus order and keyboard paths.
- WebflowWebflow and no-code
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Webflow is a visual development platform for building and hosting sites, with a CMS and an app ecosystem.
It moved website building out of the code editor for a lot of teams. What it does not solve is what happens to the site in the two years after launch.
RelatedNo-codeLow-codeCollectionComponent
Our Webflow apps - WebhookWeb and frontend
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A webhook is a callback: instead of you asking a service for changes, the service posts to your endpoint when something happens.
It is how integrations stay current without polling. It is also a public endpoint, so it needs verification and a rate limit.
RelatedAPIRESTRate limitServerless
- Website operationsCreoglyph
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Website operations is everything a marketing site needs done to it after launch, treated as a running system rather than a series of one off projects.
Content changes, audits, accessibility, performance, search structure, and the decisions about what to change next.
RelatedContinuous auditCMS operationsCare planRetainer
Creogen - White labelProduct
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White labelling is delivering work under another agency's name rather than your own.
A good share of the Webflow builds behind this company were white labelled. Creogen and Creobot are not: they stay Creoglyph products and you build the service around them.
Partner programme - WireframeDesign and UX
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A wireframe is a low fidelity layout showing structure and hierarchy without visual design.
Its value is that it is cheap to throw away. Its risk is being mistaken for a finished decision.
Nothing matches that. Try a shorter word, or ask us directly.
About this glossary
Anyone responsible for a website who has to work with people from a different discipline. A marketer reading an engineering ticket, an engineer reading a content brief, or a founder trying to work out whether an agency is describing something real.
Because a definition on its own rarely helps you decide anything. The definition tells you what a word means; the note tells you whether you should care about it this week.
Every one is a term used elsewhere on this site. If we say it in our own copy, it gets defined here. That keeps the list honest rather than padded for search.
Yes, and corrections are more welcome than additions. If a definition here is wrong or misleading, tell us and we will change it.
A term missing, or a definition you disagree with?
Tell us and we will fix it. This exists to be useful rather than complete, and an argument about a definition is usually more useful than the definition.
Every term here is one we use elsewhere on this site.