Reaching for the stars shouldn’t
trigger a fear of heights.
You’re ambitious. You want the best for your website. But it can be daunting to think about a redesign, at least in part because of the technology that’s involved. Right?
Think of it like owning a car. You don’t actually need to understand the combustion engine to get to the grocery store. Your shopping list is what matters.
UX. UI. CMS. CSS. HTML. . .
Does the alphabet soup scare you?
In ancient Babylonia, only priests were initiated into the mysteries of letters and numbers. Sometimes website design feels like that, like the techies are running the show and you’ll never understand what goes into the making of your own website (never mind the running of it).
Don’t let yourself get intimidated by the acronyms. In the end, they’re just tools to connect you and your users. And deciphering that relationship is much more important than translating Web abbreviations. Want to learn more about where technology fits in the process of remaking a website? You may also be interested in learning about how Web content strategy can make a website great.
But just in case you’re curious…
A user interface (UI) is what people see when they come to your website. It should be designed so it’s quick and easy to absorb, because that creates the best possible user experience (UX). This should be true whether you have a webmaster making changes to your site or you handle things yourself with a content management system (CMS) like Vignette or TeamSite. The tools for making it happen include cascading stylesheets (CSS) and hypertext markup language (HTML), which merely tell browsers like Internet Explorer and Firefox what fonts and colors to display.
Now you know your website ABCs. What would you like to spell with them?
