- UX (user experience)
- How using your product or site actually feels end to end: how fast it is, how easily people get what they came for, how they remember it after. UI is the cockpit; UX is the whole flight.
- Behavioral economics
- The study of how people really make decisions — emotionally and with mental shortcuts — versus the rational way economics once assumed. The science behind anchoring, loss aversion, and most things that make marketing work.
- Conversion rate
- The percentage of visitors who do the thing your site exists for — book, call, buy, sign up. The single most useful number for judging whether a website is working.
- CTA (call to action)
- The button or link asking the visitor to act: 'Book now', 'Get a quote'. Each screen should have one clear primary CTA — more than that and they compete.
- Design tokens
- Named design decisions — 'brand orange', 'card radius' — stored once and reused everywhere, so changing one value updates the whole product.
- Wireframe
- A deliberately rough sketch of a screen showing structure without visual polish. Used early, when changing direction is cheap.
- Prototype
- A clickable fake of your product, used to test a flow with real people before paying to build it. The cheapest mistakes are the ones caught here.
- Usability testing
- Watching real people attempt real tasks in your product, saying their thoughts aloud. Five users typically expose most major problems.
- Information architecture
- How content is organized and named so people find things — your menu structure, page hierarchy, and labels. Most 'our customers can't find it' problems live here.
- Responsive design
- A site that adapts its layout to any screen size. Over half of SMB website traffic is on phones; design that ignores this loses by default.
- Accessibility (a11y)
- Designing so people with disabilities — visual, motor, cognitive — can use your site. Measured against the WCAG standard; 'AA' is the level to ask for in any contract.
- Core Web Vitals
- Google's three measurements of page experience: loading speed (LCP), responsiveness (INP), and visual stability (CLS). They influence rankings and you can test yours free at PageSpeed Insights.
- LCP (Largest Contentful Paint)
- How long until the main content of a page is visible. Under 2.5 seconds is Google's bar; under 1.5 is what we build to.
- SEO (search engine optimization)
- Making your site easy for search engines to understand and worth ranking: relevant content, descriptive titles, fast pages, and links from sites people trust. A practice, not a one-time fee.
- Structured data
- Machine-readable labels in your site's code telling search engines what things are — your business, prices, FAQs — making you eligible for rich results in search.
- Landing page
- A page built for one audience and one action, usually where an ad or campaign sends people. Sending ad traffic to your homepage instead is the most common paid-marketing leak.
- A/B testing
- Showing two versions of a page to different visitors and measuring which converts better. Requires enough traffic to be meaningful — below ~1,000 visits a month, fix obvious problems instead.
- LLM (large language model)
- The technology underneath modern AI tools — software trained on enormous amounts of text until it can read and write fluently. Agents are LLMs given a job, knowledge, and limits.
- Prompt
- The instructions given to an AI system. In a business agent, the prompt encodes your services, voice, and rules — it's written, tested, and maintained like any other business asset.
- RAG (retrieval-augmented generation)
- A technique where the AI looks up answers in your real documents — price lists, policies — before responding, instead of relying on memory. It's how agents stay accurate about your business.
- Guardrails
- Hard limits on what an AI agent may say or do: topics it must refuse, prices it can only quote from your list, moments it must hand off to a human. Never deploy an agent without them.
- Human in the loop
- An automation pattern where a person approves the important steps — the agent drafts the quote, you send it. The right default for anything involving money or commitments.