How it works
Everything you will hear in a quote, without the jargon.
First how the work runs from the first enquiry to launch, then 86 terms you will hear along the way. Every term comes with one line on why it concerns you.
The run
Where each decision is made.
This is a map, not a list of phases. Each step says which decision belongs to it, because most of the arguments that come later are really arguments about when something was decided.
- 01
Enquiry and audit
You send your website address or a description of what you need. I send back what is losing you enquiries, with no sales call attached.
Decision
Whether there is anything worth doing, and what comes first.
- 02
Call and scope
An hour on what you do, who you sell to and what is not working now. Out of it comes the list of what is included in the price.
Decision
What is in scope, and what gets charged separately later.
- 03
Quote and price
A fixed price for the agreed scope, with a deadline and payment terms. Prices are public, so the quote should not be a surprise.
Decision
Package, deadline and payment terms.
- 04
Build and revisions
Structure, copy, design and development, then your comments on the finished pages. A change of scope is flagged up front, not at the end.
Decision
What goes live in the first version.
- 05
Launch and after
The site goes live, access is handed to you, the domain is in your name. After that comes the decision whether the work continues.
Decision
Hosting, maintenance or SEO, or none of them.
The detailed process sits on each service page, because it is not the same for a new build, a redesign and SEO. This is only the order of decisions, so you know what gets asked when.
Terms
What each word means, and why it concerns you.
This is not an encyclopedia. Every term also says what happens when it is ignored, because that is the only reason you would ever hear it from me.
Domain, hosting and infrastructure
Everything that has to work for the site to be reachable at all. This is the part nobody sees until it breaks.
Domain
The address people type to reach your website.
It is rented yearly and registered to you, not to your contractor. A domain that expires over a weekend can be lost for good, and every company email address goes with it.
A .ba or a .com domain
The ending of the address, which signals who you are speaking to.
A .ba ending signals the Bosnian market, .com is neutral and international. You can hold both and point one at the other, which is cheaper than changing an address you have already printed.
Hosting
The space and the machine your site runs on, around the clock.
The space itself costs little; everything around it is the reason the site still runs next year. Bad hosting does not show in a screenshot, it shows in speed and in outages nobody notices until a customer calls.
Managed hosting
Hosting where somebody else handles setup, security, backups and fixes.
The difference from plain hosting is not disk space, it is who answers when something breaks. If nobody in your company knows what a certificate is or why it expired, this is the only sensible option.
DNS
The records that tell the internet which server your site and your email are on.
Moving a site or changing email means changing DNS, and that is the moment mail usually disappears. Tidy records mean a future move is half an hour of work rather than a drama.
SSL and HTTPS
The encrypted connection between visitor and site, the one that makes the address start with https.
Without it the browser shows a warning before anyone sees your offer. The certificate renews itself, but only if somebody set it up that way.
Backup
An earlier copy of the site that everything can be restored from.
Mine is taken daily and kept for the last 30 days, so restoring is a matter of minutes. Without a copy the site gets rebuilt by hand, if at all, and that is the most expensive day of the year.
Uptime
The share of time the site is actually reachable.
The target is 99.9 percent and above, because one percentage point a year is almost four days offline. Every hour the site is down is an hour an enquiry goes to a competitor.
Monitoring
An automatic check that the site is up, which reports a fault before anyone notices it.
Without it you hear about an outage from a customer, usually on Monday for something that broke on Friday. With it I hear first, so the conversation about the fault is also the conversation about the fix.
Staging
A private copy of the site where changes are tested before they go public.
Bigger changes are never made on the live site, because then customers are the ones looking at the mistake. On a migration or a redesign, staging is the difference between a calm night and a sleepless one.
Deploy
Putting a new version of the site onto the internet.
A well set up deploy means the change appears at once and can be rolled back if something breaks. A poor one means the site is down for exactly as long as copying files takes.
CDN
A network of servers that delivers the site from a location closer to the visitor.
It earns its keep when visitors come from several countries or when the site carries a lot of images. For a local company with one market it is often cost without effect, and I will say so.
Business email
An email address on your own domain instead of a free one carrying somebody else's name.
A quote sent from a free address reads as if the company does not even have a website. The address on your domain comes with hosting and is set up in the same step, so it is not a separate job.
SEO and visibility
How people find you on Google without paying per click, and what gets measured along the way.
SEO
The work of getting found on Google without paying per click.
It is not a one-off task but ongoing work, because both Google and your competition keep moving. First results show in months, not weeks, and anyone promising otherwise is selling something else.
Technical SEO
Making sure Google can read and understand the site without obstacles.
This is the part nobody sees, and without it even the best copy never reaches search. In practice it comes down to speed, errors, duplicates and internal link structure.
On-page SEO
The headings, the copy and the structure on the page itself.
This is where it is decided which search a page can compete for at all. Ten pages saying the same thing smother each other, and that is a more common problem than having too little content.
Keyword
What a person actually types into Google.
It is rarely the official name of your service, more often a description of a problem. A site that speaks the language of the trade rather than the language of the buyer does not appear where the buyer is looking.
Search intent
Whether the person searching wants information, a comparison, or is ready to buy.
The same phrase carries three different people, and one page can only serve one of them. That is why a sales page is not written for a search that is asking for an explanation, and the other way round.
SERP
The search results page.
On it you compete not only with other companies but with maps, questions and ads. First place on a search nobody turns into work is worth less than third place on one that pays.
Indexing
Google having taken the page into its database.
Without it the page cannot appear for any search at all, however good it is. A new page is not indexed automatically and it can take days.
Crawling
Google walking the site and reading its pages.
Google does not crawl endlessly, only as much as a site is worth to it. Hundreds of empty or duplicated addresses spend that budget instead of the pages that bring you enquiries.
Search Console
A free Google tool that shows which searches people find you through.
It is the only source that is real data from your site rather than an estimate. If it is not set up you are working blind, which is why setting it up is the first step of any SEO work.
Sitemap
A list of all pages submitted to Google.
It speeds up the discovery of new pages and shows what you consider important. A sitemap full of addresses that return errors does the opposite of what it exists for.
robots.txt
Instructions telling search engines what they may and may not visit.
One wrong line in that file takes an entire site out of search, and it happens more often than you would think. It is the first thing to check when traffic disappears overnight.
Backlink
A link from somebody else's site to yours.
One of the trust signals, but only when it comes from somewhere that has something to do with you. Links bought in packs of a thousand do damage now, not good.
Local SEO
Visibility for searches tied to a town and its surroundings.
For a service business it is the most profitable part of SEO, because that kind of search most often turns into a call the same day. It needs a tidy maps profile and pages that genuinely speak about the area.
Google Business Profile
Your profile on Google search and on maps.
For a local company it is often the first source of calls, ahead of the website itself. Opening hours that are wrong and photos from five years ago cost more than people assume.
Meta title and description
The text shown in a Google result.
It is your advert, and whether anyone clicks depends on it even when you rank first. Google is allowed to rewrite it, but does so less often when it is written well.
Canonical
A tag telling Google which version of a page is the main one.
The same page often exists at several addresses: with and without www, with campaign parameters attached. Without this tag Google picks on its own, and it can pick the one you would not.
Redirect (301)
A permanent forward from an old address to a new one.
Without it every address changed in a redesign becomes an error, and the rankings the old page held do not carry over. It is the one part of a migration you feel if it is skipped.
hreflang
A tag telling Google which version of a page belongs to which language.
Without it the German and the Bosnian version of the same page compete with each other instead of with the competition. It is set up in the same step as the language, not afterwards.
Structured data
Extra data in the code that explains to Google what is on the page.
It is what produces questions, prices and other extras in a search result. Data that sits there but not on the page itself is grounds for a penalty, so nothing goes in that cannot be shown.
Conversions and measurement
A website exists for enquiries, not for visits. These are the words used to measure whether it brings them.
Conversion
The action the site exists for: an enquiry sent, a call made, an order placed.
Visits on their own pay for nothing. Until conversions are measured, every story about a site being a success is an impression rather than a fact.
Lead
Contact from somebody who could become a client.
A site bringing two serious enquiries a month beats one with a thousand visits and none. That is why everything on the page is measured against enquiries rather than visitor counts.
Qualified lead
An enquiry that already carries the details needed to quote.
Town, measurements, deadline and rough budget in the first message save a whole round of emails. The form is written to ask for them without scaring off somebody who does not have them yet.
CTA (call to action)
The button or sentence asking for one concrete action.
A page with five equal buttons has none. The biggest jump in enquiries usually comes from deciding what the one thing a visitor should do actually is.
Funnel
The path from a first visit to a sent enquiry.
People do not drop off evenly, they drop off at one specific point. Once you know where, the fix is usually one page rather than the whole site.
Landing page
A page built for one single action.
It is used for a campaign or a single service, without the rest of the menu pulling attention away. There is no point building one until the ordinary service pages do their job.
Conversion rate
The share of visitors who do what is asked of them.
Doubling the rate is worth as much as doubling the traffic, and it costs far less. That is why the page gets fixed first and traffic gets paid for second.
Traffic source
Where a visitor came from: Google, social, direct or a referral.
Without it you cannot tell which of your spending works, so you spend by feel. The usual surprise is how much work comes from maps and how little from posts.
UTM tags
An addition to a link that says which campaign a visitor arrived from.
Without them all campaign traffic blurs into one pile. They are set up once, and the difference is between a report that means something and one that does not.
Event
A recorded action on the site: a tap on the phone number, a form opened, a form sent.
Calls placed from a mobile often outnumber sent forms, and none of it shows up unless it is measured. Those actions are what builds the picture of what people actually do on the page.
A/B test
Two versions of the same page running at once, to see which brings more enquiries.
It only makes sense once there is enough traffic for the difference not to be chance. On a site with ten enquiries a month a test is wasted time, and I will say that rather than bill for it.
First-party analytics
Measurement on your own system instead of through a third-party tool.
The data stays with you, only what was agreed gets measured, and visitors are not profiled. The report is also shorter, because it shows what a decision is made on rather than a hundred charts.
Content and systems
Who edits the text, where the enquiries show up, and how the site talks to the tools you already use.
CMS
The system you edit text and images in yourself, without a developer.
The difference shows the first time a price or an opening hour has to change. A site without one means waiting for somebody for every small thing, and that usually costs more than the CMS.
Admin panel
The protected part of the site where you see enquiries, numbers and content.
It is built per project, because every company watches different numbers. The base is always the same: revenue, earnings, click tracking and where people came from.
CRM
A record of contacts and their status: who asked, what was quoted, what happens next.
Enquiries living in somebody's phone get lost, and it never shows because nobody counts what was missed. For a smaller company a tidy list inside the panel is enough, not a separate program.
API
A way for two programs to exchange data automatically.
It is what lets an order from the site go straight into accounting or into delivery. Every such link is a job of its own and is estimated separately, because it depends on somebody else's program.
Integration
Connecting the site to a tool you already use.
Accounting, delivery, mailing list and payments are the usual ones. This is the item that raises a price the most, so it is discussed before the quote rather than mid-project.
Database
Where enquiries, products and the rest of the data are kept.
Its structure decides what is cheap later and what is expensive. That is why it is decided at the start, even though a visitor never sees it.
User role
Who is allowed to see and change what inside the panel.
The person entering products does not need to see the earnings. Without roles every account can do everything, so one wrong click deletes what nobody meant to.
Gallery or catalogue
A structure for showing work or products, with filtering.
The difference from an ordinary page of photos is that each item can be found through search. For a trade business a tidy gallery of past work often argues better than a page of text.
Applications and product
Where a website stops being a set of pages and becomes a system that does something.
Web application
A system in the browser that does something, rather than only showing information.
The line is simple: if a user enters data and the system calculates or records something from it, it is no longer a website. Price and deadline are then worked out in phases rather than up front.
Discovery
A paid phase that defines exactly what gets built, before the first line of code.
It produces a document with scope, flows and an estimate, usable with another contractor too. It is paid for because it is work, not a sales meeting.
Prototype
A clickable model with nothing real behind it, so decisions can be tested cheaply.
A change on a prototype takes an hour; the same change on a finished system takes a week. This is the cheapest place to change your mind, which is why it is not skipped.
MVP
The first real version, carrying only the features the system makes no sense without.
It is not a cheaper version but a narrower one, and that is the difference. The point is to get the system in front of real users before the budget goes on features nobody opens.
SaaS
Software used through a subscription, with nothing to install.
For the buyer it means no servers and no versions, just a monthly bill. For whoever builds it, it means the work does not end at launch, it starts there.
Multi-tenant
One system serving several companies, with their data strictly separated.
It is cheaper than a separate system per company, but it needs the separation solved at the start. This is a decision that cannot be changed later without rewriting the system.
Working together, contract and money
The words that cause most of the misunderstandings, which is why they get the most concrete definitions here.
Scope
The exact list of what has been agreed and included in the price.
Every argument about money at the end of a project starts as a misunderstanding about scope at the beginning. That is why the list is written down before work starts, not held in somebody's head.
Scope change
Anything asked for beyond the agreed list.
It is charged separately and flagged up front, not at the end. New pages and new features are a scope change; fixing something that was agreed and not delivered is not.
Revision round
One round of your comments on the finished design or copy.
Two are included, and they are smaller changes to finished pages. Larger changes and anything after those two rounds are charged separately, so it pays to gather comments in one place.
Retainer
A monthly arrangement with an agreed amount of work.
What you pay for is that somebody answers and makes the change, within a known deadline and without negotiating each time. It has a minimum term, because below it there is nothing to show.
SLA
The agreed time to respond and to resolve when something stops working.
Without it a deadline is a matter of mood, and you find that out exactly when you cannot afford to. The times for maintenance packages are public on the hosting page, not buried in a contract you get later.
Fair use
A stated limit of reasonable use on monthly packages, instead of a promise that everything is unlimited.
Unlimited does not exist anywhere, it simply goes unwritten. It is fairer to have the limit written down so you know when something is inside the package and when it is agreed separately.
Ownership
Who owns the domain, the hosting, the code and the content.
With me that is the client, and the domain is in your name from day one. On a project paid through a monthly partnership, ownership passes to you once the partnership is paid off, and the term and exit conditions are on the pricing page.
NDA
An agreement that the project is not discussed publicly.
It means the project does not go into the portfolio, neither as an image nor as a name. If that matters to you, it is said before the start, because it cannot be taken back after publication.
Deposit
The part of the price paid before work begins.
On a website build the payment runs in three instalments and the first is the deposit; the exact percentages are on the pricing page. If a larger deposit does not suit you, the partnership offers a smaller setup fee and a monthly amount instead.
Service credit
A discount given as work done rather than money returned.
It turns up on monthly packages and on referrals, and it is not the same as a refund. Before agreeing to one, ask exactly what can be done for that credit and how long it stays valid.
White label
Work delivered under somebody else's brand, usually for agencies and partners.
The agency's client sees only the agency, and the contractor appears nowhere. As a buyer it matters that you know who actually does the work, because that decides who answers when you need them.
Technology and performance
What tools measure, and what people feel as speed and as whether the site works on a phone.
Responsive
A site that works equally well on a phone, a tablet and a computer.
Today that is the minimum, not an extra to be charged for. The test is simple: open your own site on a phone and try to find your phone number in ten seconds.
Mobile-first
The site is built for the phone first, then widened for larger screens.
Most visitors to a local company arrive on a phone, often from maps. Done the other way round, what is left on the phone is a squeezed desktop, and that is where most enquiries are lost.
Core Web Vitals
Google's measure of page speed and stability from the user's point of view.
It measures what a person feels: how long they wait and how much the content jumps. Poor scores do not sink rankings on their own, but they do sink the number of people who stay.
LCP
How long it takes for the main content of the page to appear.
That is the moment a visitor decides the site has loaded. The target is under 1.8 seconds, because beyond that people start leaving before they see anything.
CLS
How much the content jumps around while the page loads.
The jumping usually comes from images without a set size and from fonts or ads arriving late. The target is close to zero, because a missed tap on a phone reads as a broken site.
PageSpeed and Lighthouse
Free Google tests of a page's speed and quality.
The result is public, so you can check it for yourself and for your competition before ordering anything. A hundred out of a hundred is not the goal at any cost, but a wide gap to the competition is a fact worth having.
Framework
The tool a site is built on.
It decides who can work on the site later and what maintenance costs. The choice is made on who will edit the content, not on what the contractor prefers.
WordPress
The most widely used CMS in the world.
It is easy to edit and plenty of people know it, so you are not tied to one contractor. The price of that is regular maintenance, because plugins and core have to be updated for the site to stay safe.
Next.js
A framework for fast sites with full control over the code.
It gives better speed and fewer things that break on their own, because there are no dozens of plugins. For content that changes daily it needs an editing layer, and that is a separate agreement.
Accessibility (WCAG)
Making the site usable by people with impaired sight, hearing or motor control.
The same work helps everyone: more contrast in sunlight, a site that works from the keyboard, video with captions. On some European markets it is a legal obligation rather than a choice.
Progressive enhancement
Making sure the basics still work when JavaScript fails.
Forms, navigation and text have to work on a poor connection and in an older browser. A site where an enquiry cannot be sent without scripts loses exactly the visitors who struggle most to reach you.
Privacy and legal
What may be measured, whose obligation that is, and how long data is kept.
Cookie
A small record a site leaves in the visitor's browser.
Some are technically necessary, for logins and baskets, and some exist only for tracking. The difference matters, because the second kind requires asking the visitor.
Consent
The visitor's permission for measurement that is not technically necessary.
It has to be given before the measurement, freely, and refusing has to be equally easy. A banner with only an accept button is not consent, it is a formality.
GDPR
The European rules on personal data.
They concern you the moment you target an EU market or take enquiries from one, wherever your company sits. In practice they mean knowing what is collected, why, how long it is kept and who it goes to.
Controller and processor
Who decides about the data and who technically processes it.
The controller is usually your company, the processor is the contractor and the tools they use. The split matters because the obligation towards the visitor stays with the controller, which is you.
Retention
How long data is kept before it is deleted.
Keeping everything forever is not caution, it is risk and one more obligation. The period is set per type of data and written into the privacy policy, not decided when it comes up.
Pseudonymous identifier
A visitor marker that is neither a name nor an email and does not reveal who the person is.
It allows a return visit to be counted without keeping personal data. It is not the same as anonymous, because with enough other data it can still be tied back to a person.
Questions
What gets asked after the quote.
Ten questions that are decisions rather than definitions. The answers are the ones I would give in person.
- Do I have to understand all of these terms?
- No. This is a glossary for checking, not an exam. It is enough to understand what your own quote says, and if something in there is unclear, that is my failure in writing the quote, not yours.
- What is the difference between hosting and maintenance?
- Hosting is the place the site sits. Maintenance is the time of a person who answers when something needs changing or fixing. A site can have hosting without maintenance, but then there is nobody to call.
- What does it mean when somebody says a site is optimised?
- On its own it means nothing, because the word covers speed, search and mobile display alike. Ask what was done specifically and how it can be seen. If the answer contains no number and no tool, the word was decoration.
- Do I need a shop, or is a catalogue without payment enough?
- If orders get agreed in conversation anyway, a catalogue with an enquiry form is cheaper and faster. A shop makes sense once the number of orders means the messaging eats your day, or once you sell beyond your own town.
- Why do so many terms have English names?
- Because that is how they entered the trade and how every contractor says them. Translating them by force would make the next quote you read sound like a different profession. That is why both the English name and the plain explanation are here.
- What happens to the site if you stop working?
- The domain, the hosting and the access are in your name, and the code and content are yours. That means another contractor can take the site over without asking me anything. That is exactly why ownership is set up this way from day one.
- Who is responsible when the site is down?
- If the site is on maintenance with me, I am. The response and resolution times are public on the hosting and maintenance page. If the site sits elsewhere, the first step is establishing what actually failed, because responsibility is split between hosting, domain and the site itself.
- How do I check somebody else's quote if I do not understand it?
- Ask for the list of what is in the price, who owns the domain and the code, how many revision rounds are included, and what happens after launch. A quote with no written answer to those four is not cheaper, only shorter.
- Why does the price differ by market when the work is the same?
- Because the price is tied to the value the site brings on that market and to the cost of doing business there, not to an exchange rate. Amounts are never converted at a rate, they are set separately for each market.
- What if my term is not on the list?
- Send it along with your enquiry and you will get the answer in the same reply. The list grows from what clients actually hear and ask, not from what sounds clever.
Next
Now that the words make sense.
If you want to know what specifically should be fixed on your own site, send the address and you will get a review with no obligation.