Web Design Glossary

Definitions for key terms in web design, lead generation, AI visibility and sales.

  • Lead Generation — The process of identifying and attracting potential customers (leads) to a business.
  • Lead Scoring — A method of ranking leads by their likelihood to convert, based on attributes such as website quality, engagement and fit.
  • Website Audit — A comprehensive analysis of a website covering technical performance, design quality, SEO, mobile responsiveness and trust signals.
  • Cold Outreach — Contacting potential customers who have not previously engaged with your business, typically via email or direct message.
  • Prospect — A potential customer who matches your target market and has been identified as someone who might benefit from your services.
  • Conversion Rate — The percentage of leads that progress to a desired outcome, such as a reply, meeting or closed deal.
  • Pipeline — A visual representation of all active leads organized by their current stage in the sales process.
  • CRM (Customer Relationship Management) — Software for managing relationships and interactions with current and potential clients.
  • Website Redesign — The process of updating or rebuilding an existing website to improve its design, performance, usability or content.
  • SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) — Techniques to improve a website's visibility in traditional search engine results pages.
  • GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation) — Techniques to improve the likelihood that an AI language model will cite or recommend a website in its generated responses.
  • AEO (Answer Engine Optimisation) — Optimising content so that AI answer engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity and Claude surface it when answering questions.
  • llms.txt — A plain-text file placed at the root of a website that provides AI language model crawlers with a structured summary of the site's content and purpose.
  • Schema Markup — Structured data added to HTML that helps search engines and AI crawlers understand the content of a page.
  • Proposal — A document sent to a potential client that outlines the scope, timeline, deliverables and pricing for a web design project.
  • Cold Email — An unsolicited email sent to a potential customer who has no prior relationship with the sender.
  • Web Design Brief — A document that captures the goals, requirements and constraints for a web design project.
  • Answer Engine — An AI system that generates direct answers to questions, such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews and Microsoft Copilot.
  • AI Crawler — A bot operated by an AI company that indexes web content to train language models or populate AI answer engines.
  • Value-Based Pricing — Setting prices based on the perceived value delivered to the client rather than on costs or hours worked.