Important terms to know in the blogger world

Here’s a handy guide to the different terms you’ll need to know as a blogger.

Article: the material you write as a blogger. Make sure to provide your articles with a date so they can be sorted chronologically

Above the fold: the content on a blog that appears without scrolling down. This is the most impactful area of your website.

Blacklist: Lists of URLs identified as spam URLs and therefore eliminated from comments and trackbacks on a blog

Blinking: a type of user behaviour where the visitor hops from blog to blog by clicking on the links on the page – often links found on the sidebar. Also called b-linking’ or b'linking.

Blogsite: a website that combines blog feeds from a number of different sources, including non-blog sources

CMS: a ‘Content Management System’ allows you to easily create and modify content

CSS: ‘Cascading Style Sheets’ allow you to customise the layout of pages in your CMS,  without having to work in the code

Footer: at the bottom of a website is usually a ‘footer’ area. Good for legal information, credits and other important information.

FTP: ‘File Transfer Protocol’ is used to upload your files to the server. You need this when you work with a CMS.

Header: the upper part of a website layout, mostly logos etc.

Plug-in: a piece of software code that you can ‘plug in’ to another software application — hence the name ‘plug-in.

RSS feed: a type of web feed which allows users to access updates to online content in a standardised, computer-readable format. These feeds can, for example, allow a user to keep track of many different websites in a single news aggregator. Often used in CMS.

Sidebar: the area on the side of the main area of a web page. Can include advertising or navigation elements

Spam: unsolicited or undesired electronic messages such as advertisements

Tags:a keyword or term assigned to a piece of information. This kind of metadata helps describe an item and allows it to be found again by browsing or searching. Tags are generally chosen informally and personally by the item's creator or by its viewer. Tags are searchable and are used for finding and organising blog posts.

Theme: in WordPress, the term ‘Theme’ refers to a pre-created website layout used to automatically style content. For beginner bloggers this is a good way to quickly set up your website without needing extensive coding background.

Widget: a feature which makes adding site elements such as calendars, banners or other useful functionality easier. This is used by CMS’s and also provided by Booking.com.

Wordpress: an online, open source website creation tool written in PHP. Known to be the easiest and most powerful blogging and website content management system today.

WYSIWYG: an abbreviation of ‘What you see is what you get’. It allows a blogger to see what the end result will look like while the interface or document is being created. Popular optimisation programmes like Optimizely or Visual Website Optimizer allow non-technical bloggers to optimise their website without touching the code.