Knowledge Base / Reference
Plain-English Glossary
Every term a client might ask about, with the analogy we actually use. Sellers: steal these lines verbatim. If a client leaves a call more confused than they arrived, we did it wrong.
The big three (get these perfect)
| Term | What it is | Say it like this |
|---|---|---|
| Domain | The name people type to find you (yourbusiness.com), rented yearly from a registrar | "Your address. Owning it doesn't mean you have a house yet, just the plot of land." |
| Hosting | The computer (server) where your website's files live, online 24/7 | "The land your building stands on. Someone has to keep the lights on; that's the $19 a month." |
| Website | The actual pages people visit: design, words, forms, everything | "The building itself. It's the part that does the work: greets people, answers questions, takes the job." |
Connection & setup
| Term | Plain English |
|---|---|
| DNS | The internet's address book. It tells browsers which server answers for your domain. "Updating DNS" = filing a change-of-address card. Changes take a few hours to spread; that delay is normal. |
| Nameserver | Which company's copy of the address book your domain uses. Point the nameservers at the host and the host handles the rest. |
| A record / CNAME | Individual lines in the address book. An A record says "this name lives at this server". Clients never need to touch these; that's the point of us. |
| SSL / HTTPS | The padlock in the browser. Encrypts traffic, and Google penalizes sites without it. Included in every build, never an upsell. |
| Registrar | The company the domain was bought from (GoDaddy, Namecheap...). The client keeps ownership; we just need access to point it. |
| Business email | you@yourbusiness.com instead of a Gmail. Small monthly cost, big trust win. First thing we suggest after launch. |
Performance & quality
| Term | Plain English |
|---|---|
| Load time / page speed | How long until the page is usable. Every extra second costs roughly 2% of conversions; half of mobile users leave after 3 seconds. Our target is ~0.2s, which is the strongest technical claim we make. |
| Core Web Vitals | Google's three speed-and-stability grades for a page (loading, interactivity, layout stability). Good vitals help rankings; bad ones quietly sink them. |
| Responsive / mobile-first | The site rearranges itself to look right on any screen. Most local-business traffic is phones, so we design for the phone first. |
| CDN | Copies of the site stored around the world so it loads fast everywhere. Included with our hosting. |
| Static site | Pages prepared in advance instead of assembled on every visit. It's why our sites are fast and hard to hack: there's no machinery running, just finished pages. |
| Template vs custom | A template is a pre-made design thousands of businesses share. Custom means designed and coded for one business. We only do custom; it's the whole brand. |
Getting found (SEO)
| Term | Plain English |
|---|---|
| SEO | Making a site easy for Google to find, understand, and recommend. Two halves: technical (speed, structure, labels) and content (answering what customers actually search). |
| Keyword | The phrase someone types into Google ("emergency plumber austin"). Pages are built to answer specific keywords. |
| Ranking / SERP | Where you appear in the search results page. Page two might as well be nowhere. |
| Meta title & description | The headline and blurb Google shows for your page. Your shop window in the search results. |
| Schema / structured data | Labels in the code that tell Google exactly what things are (business, price, review, FAQ). Makes you eligible for the rich, eye-catching results. |
| Sitemap / robots.txt | The site's table of contents for Google, and the note telling crawlers what to read. Housekeeping we handle on every build. |
| Canonical | When similar content exists at two addresses, the canonical tag tells Google which one is the original, so the copies don't compete with each other. |
| Backlink | Another site linking to yours; a vote of confidence to Google. Earned with good content and real outreach, never bought. Buying links gets sites penalized. |
| Google Search Console / Analytics | Google's free dashboards: Search Console shows how you appear in search; Analytics shows what visitors do on the site. We set up both so results are measurable, not vibes. |
| Indexing | Google adding your pages to its library. Until a page is indexed it cannot rank at all, which is why we submit the sitemap at launch. |
Leads & conversion
| Term | Plain English |
|---|---|
| Lead | A potential customer who raised their hand: submitted a form, called, booked. The site's entire job. |
| Conversion / conversion rate | A visitor becoming a lead, and the percentage that do. Doubling conversion doubles business with zero extra traffic; it's the cheapest growth there is. |
| CTA (call to action) | The one obvious thing a page asks you to do: "Get a free quote". Every page gets exactly one primary CTA. |
| Lead machine | Our phrase for a site engineered around conversion: fast load, clear paths, working forms, click-to-call, analytics proving it. |
| Funnel | The path from stranger to customer (see it → visit → trust → contact). We design pages as steps in that path, not as brochures. |
LlamaMakers-specific terms
| Term | Meaning here |
|---|---|
| Vibe / Vibe Mode | One of our six design languages (Corporate, Gen-Z, Artistic, Reader, Gamer, Futuristic). A benchmark for taste, not a template. |
| Vibe switcher | The control on llamamakers.com that flips the whole site between vibes live. Our best demo; end most pitches with it. |
| Starter Kit | Our internal Next.js foundation every new client site is copied from: SEO scaffolding, animations, config-driven metadata prewired. |
| Design Library | The curated vault (F:\Burney's Design Library) of animations, components, fonts, textures, and reference sites mined on every build. |
| AI tells | Design patterns that scream "generated": identical rounded-card grids, icon-in-square headers, template copy, emoji confetti. Banned on everything we ship. |
| Care Plan | The $99/mo subscription: maintenance, monthly edits, security monitoring, performance checks. The relationship after the build. |
| The mockup close | Building a free homepage preview in the prospect's vibe before they pay, then selling the rest of the site. Highest-converting play we run. |
Development terms
| Term | Plain English |
|---|---|
| Frontend / backend | Frontend is everything the visitor sees and touches; backend is machinery behind the scenes (databases, logins, payments). Our sites are almost all frontend on purpose: fewer moving parts, less to break. |
| HTML / CSS / JavaScript | The three languages of every web page: HTML is the content and structure, CSS is the look, JavaScript is the behavior (menus, animations, forms). |
| React / Next.js | Our building toolkit. React lets us build pages from reusable components; Next.js wraps React and lets us pre-build everything into fast static pages. |
| Component | A reusable building block (a card, a header, a button style) built once and used everywhere, so the site stays consistent and fast to change. |
| Static export / prerender | Preparing every page as finished HTML before upload, instead of assembling pages on each visit. The core of our speed and security story. |
| API | A doorway that lets two systems talk (our form talks to Formspree's API; a booking widget talks to a calendar's API). |
| CMS | Content Management System: an editing dashboard (WordPress is one). We skip the CMS for speed; routine edits are what the Care Plan is for. |
| Cache / CDN | Cache = keeping a ready copy close by so repeat loads are instant. CDN = a network of servers worldwide holding those copies so the site is fast everywhere. |
| Staging / preview | A private copy of the site where clients review before launch. Nothing goes live without passing through preview. |
| Repository / version control | The project's full change history, so any earlier state can be recovered and nothing is ever "lost". |
| Lighthouse | Google's built-in report card for a page: performance, accessibility, best practices, SEO, each scored out of 100. Our QA gate requires green (90+) across the board. |
| Lazy loading | Loading images/video only when the visitor scrolls near them, so the top of the page appears instantly. |
Design terms
| Term | Plain English |
|---|---|
| Vector vs raster | Vector art (SVG/AI) is math: it scales to any size perfectly; logos must be vector. Raster (PNG/JPG) is pixels: it blurs when enlarged; photos are raster. |
| RGB vs CMYK | RGB is screen color (glowing light); CMYK is print color (ink). Neon RGB colors dull down in CMYK, so print work is designed in CMYK from the start. |
| DPI / resolution | Dots per inch: print needs 300 DPI at final size; screens care about pixel dimensions instead. A crisp Instagram image can still print blurry. |
| Bleed & safe area | Bleed = design extending ~3mm past the trim line so cutting never leaves white slivers. Safe area = keep text this far inside the trim. Both are mandatory for print. |
| Dieline | The flat cut-and-fold template for packaging from the supplier. Packaging is designed ON the dieline, never freehand. |
| Mockup | Showing a design in realistic context (a flyer on a table, a wrap on the van, a site on a phone). We present in mockups because clients buy what they can picture. |
| Wireframe | The rough boxes-and-labels skeleton of a page, agreed before any styling, so structure debates happen cheaply. |
| Typography terms | Typeface = the design (family); font = one weight/style of it. Kerning/tracking = space between letters; leading = space between lines. Serif has the little feet (bookish); sans-serif doesn't (modern). |
| Brand kit / guidelines | The rulebook of a brand: logo versions, colors (HEX + CMYK), fonts, spacing, do/don't examples. What "on-brand" is measured against. |
| Whitespace | Deliberate empty space that groups content and signals quality. Cramming is the amateur tell; whitespace is the luxury tell. |
| Glassmorphism / brutalism | Style vocabularies we use per vibe: frosted-glass translucency (Artistic) and raw, bold, boxy maximalism (Gen-Z), respectively. |
| Perforated film (perf) | Wrap material for vehicle windows: printed outside, see-through from inside. No fine detail survives on perf. |
Marketing & social terms
| Term | Plain English |
|---|---|
| Impressions vs reach | Impressions = times shown (one person can count five times). Reach = unique people who saw it. |
| CTR | Click-through rate: of everyone who saw it, the % who clicked. Judges how compelling the creative/message is. |
| CPC / CPM | Cost per click / cost per thousand impressions: the two ways ad platforms charge. |
| CPL / CAC | Cost per lead / customer acquisition cost: what one lead, or one actual customer, costs to win. The numbers that decide if ads make sense. |
| ROAS | Return on ad spend: revenue per ad dollar. The owner's number. |
| Conversion / CVR | The visitor doing the thing (form, call, purchase), and the rate at which visits become conversions. Judges the landing page. |
| Retargeting / remarketing | Showing ads only to people who already visited the site. Cheapest conversions in advertising; needs the pixel installed first. |
| Pixel / tag | A small tracking snippet on the site that tells ad platforms who visited and what they did, enabling retargeting and conversion measurement. |
| SEM / PPC | Search engine marketing / pay-per-click: the paid ads above the organic results. SEO's paid sibling. |
| LSA | Google Local Services Ads: pay-per-lead (not per click) ads for local trades, with a "Google Guaranteed" badge. Often the best first ad dollar for our clients. |
| Organic vs paid social | Organic = posts to your followers, free. Paid = boosted/targeted ads. Organic builds trust; paid buys reach. |
| Engagement | Likes, comments, saves, shares. Saves and shares matter most; raw likes are applause, not results. |
| Hook | The first line or frame that stops the scroll. 80% of a post's performance is decided here. |
| UGC | User-generated content: customers' own photos/videos/reviews. The most trusted content type; always get permission before reposting. |
| A/B test | Running two versions (headline A vs B) and letting the numbers pick the winner instead of opinions. |
| Funnel stages (TOFU/MOFU/BOFU) | Top/middle/bottom of funnel: strangers discovering you → comparers evaluating you → buyers acting. Content is written for one stage at a time. |
| Newsletter / list | The email audience you own. Platforms can bury your posts; nobody can algorithm your email list away. |