Glossary · plain English
Glossary
Every trade hides behind its vocabulary, and ours is worse than most. Here is every technical word this site leans on, in plain English. Anywhere you see a dotted underline, hover it for the short version; it links back here for the rest.
The words
Alphabetical, jargon-free, and honest about the trade-offs.
AEO
Answer engine optimisation: being pulled into a direct answer, a featured box or a voice assistant’s reply, rather than a list someone has to click through.
Analytics
Counting your visitors: where they came from, what they looked at. We set up analytics you own, rather than handing your traffic data to an advertising company.
Bandwidth
The data your site sends to visitors. Some hosts charge more as more people visit; ours doesn’t.
Breaking change
Software your site depends on gets updated by the people who wrote it. Usually the new version is a drop-in replacement. Sometimes it changes how it expects to be used, and the site that worked on Monday breaks on Tuesday. That is a breaking change. Nothing is wrong with anyone: it is the normal cost of software being maintained. It matters here because a breaking change is the main reason an automatic update needs a person, and who pays for that person is what the Styx tiers actually differ on.
Checkout
The part of a shop where the buying happens: basket, details, payment. On our builds the money settles to your own account.
Cold storage
Cheap, slower storage for files you rarely need: archives, records, old snapshots. Pennies to keep, a small fee to pull back out.
Commit
Every time code changes, that change is saved as a commit: a snapshot with an author’s name and a timestamp attached. Strung together they form the complete history of your website, which lives in your repository and which you can read without asking us. It matters beyond curiosity: the warranty depends on every commit having been made by us, and because the history is yours, that is something you can check rather than take on trust.
Cookie consent
The banner asking permission to store small bits of data in a visitor’s browser. UK sites must ask properly; we keep yours compliant.
CRM
Customer relationship management: software where a business keeps track of customers and conversations. A website can feed its enquiries straight into one.
Dependency
A ready-made piece of software a site is built with, like buying good hinges instead of forging your own. They need updating now and then to stay safe.
Domain
Your address on the internet: the yourbusiness.co.uk people type in. Whoever registers it controls it, which is why yours is registered to you.
E-commerce
Selling on a website: catalogue, basket, checkout, payments, orders. The whole machine for taking money online.
GEO
Generative engine optimisation: being cited correctly when an AI tool answers a question, rather than ranked in a list of links.
Handover
Handover is the end of a build, and on most of this site it means something specific rather than “we emailed you a link”. It is the moment the domain is confirmed in your registrar account, the code is confirmed in your repository, any third-party accounts are in your name, and the whole lot is written down as a checklist you keep. Plenty of agencies use the word for a phone call. We use it for a document you could hand to another developer.
Hashing
A one-way scramble applied to passwords before storing them, so nobody, including us, can read the original. Sign-ins are checked by scrambling again and comparing.
Hosting
Keeping your website on a computer that is always on and connected, so anyone can visit at any time. Paying for hosting is paying for that seat.
Integration
A connection between your website and another system: card payments, calendars, a mailing list. Each one is its own small bridge, built once.
Open-source
Open-source software is written in the open: the code is public, anyone can inspect it, and it is generally free to use. Nearly every website in existence is assembled partly from it, because rewriting a calendar or an image handler from scratch for every project would be absurd. The trade-off is that these pieces are maintained by other people on their own schedule, which is precisely why they need watching and updating rather than installing once and forgetting.
Overage
Work that goes past the hours already included in your plan, charged at a published hourly rate. Agreed with you before the clock starts, never discovered afterwards.
Payment gateway
The service that takes card payments on a website and moves the money into a bank account. On our builds it settles to your account, never ours.
Plugin
An add-on that bolts a feature onto a website. Convenient at first, risky over time: plugins are maintained by strangers who can stop updating at any moment.
Registrar
The company a domain is registered through and renewed with. Your registrar account is where you prove the address is yours.
Repository
A repository (or “repo”) is a folder for your website’s code, kept safe online with a complete history of every change ever made to it. Services like GitHub host them. Ours are registered to you, in your account, so the code is legally and practically yours, the way a house deed sits in your name rather than your builder’s.
Retainer
An agreed block of hours reserved for you each month or quarter, at a lower rate than one-off work, because committing in advance lets us schedule it.
Schema markup
A person reading your page can tell that “£40” is a price and “Tuesday 9–5” is opening hours. Software cannot, reliably, unless you label it. Schema markup is a standard set of those labels, invisible to visitors, sitting in the page for machines to read. It is why a search result can show your rating and hours without anyone clicking through, and it is a large part of how AI tools quote a business correctly rather than guessing. We put it into every build as standard.
Scope
Scope is the written answer to “what, precisely, am I buying?”: the pages, the features, the functionality, listed before anyone starts work. It matters because it is the thing a price is attached to. A quote with no scope behind it is a number with nothing holding it up, which is how a build that was “about two thousand” arrives at four. Ours is a document you agree before we begin, and it stays the thing we both point at afterwards. If you want something that isn’t on it, we price that and add it to the scope, in writing, before it gets built. Never after.
Search-engine basics
The unglamorous work of helping search engines understand your site: titles, descriptions, speed, structure. Not magic rankings, just a site that’s easy to index.
Security patch
A small update that fixes a newly found weakness in software before anyone abuses it. Sites that never get patched become easy targets.
Semantic HTML
Writing a page’s structure so machines understand what things are: headings, lists, buttons. It’s what makes a site work with screen readers and read properly in search.
Sprint
A short, fixed block of scheduled work with a planned list. Where your job lands in our sprint schedule is what the Styx tiers actually buy.
Met a word we haven’t explained? Tell us and we’ll add it. And if anyone ever answers your question with jargon instead of an answer, that’s a choice they made: our principles say so.