A website building glossary

MCP, the Model Context Protocol, is an open standard that lets an AI app connect to outside tools and data through one common interface.

MCP tools are the actions an MCP server offers an AI app, each with a name, a description and the arguments it takes, such as read a file, edit a file or take a screenshot.

Streamable HTTP is the MCP transport for remote servers: the client sends each message as an HTTP POST to one endpoint, and the server can answer with a single response or a stream of events.

MCP OAuth is how a remote MCP server signs in the person using an AI app: the app opens the server's sign-in page, you approve access, and the app gets a token it sends with every call.

Vibe coding is building software by describing what you want to an AI in plain words and accepting the code it writes, judging the result by how it looks and works rather than by reading the code.

An AI-built site is a website whose code was written mostly by an AI app, such as Claude Code or Cursor, from descriptions rather than by hand.

llms.txt is a plain Markdown file at a site's root, /llms.txt, that tells AI tools what the site is and links to its most useful pages with a line about each.

A Markdown twin is a plain Markdown version of a web page served alongside the HTML, so AI agents and tools can read the page's content without its layout and scripts.

A visual editor lets you change a website by clicking and editing the page itself, its text, images, layout and styles, instead of writing the code by hand.

Design handoff is the step where a finished design passes from the people who designed it to the people who build it, with the measurements, styles and behaviour they need to match it.

A wireframe is a simple drawing of a page's layout, in grey boxes and placeholder lines, that shows what goes where before any design or copy is final.

Design tokens are the named values a design system is built from, such as brand colours, font families, text sizes and spacing steps, kept in one place and used everywhere.

Tailwind v4 theme tokens are CSS variables declared in an @theme block that define a site's colours, fonts, sizes and spacing, and that Tailwind turns into utility classes.

Fluid type is text whose size grows smoothly with the width of the screen between a minimum and a maximum, usually written with the CSS clamp() function.

A breakpoint is a screen width at which a website's layout changes, such as moving from one column on phones to two columns on tablets.

Responsive design is building one website that adapts its layout, images and type to every screen size, instead of making separate sites for phones and desktops.

Contrast ratio measures how much text stands out from its background, from 1:1 (no difference) to 21:1 (black on white); WCAG asks for at least 4.5:1 for body text.

Content collections are groups of entries of the same kind, such as blog posts, projects or team members, that share one set of fields and live as files beside a site's code.

A CMS schema is the definition of a site's content types and their fields, such as a blog post with a title, a date, an author reference and a body, that every entry must follow.

A reference field links a content item to an item in another collection, such as a blog post to its author, so shared details are kept in one place.

A collection list is an element that repeats one design for each item of a content collection, such as cards for the latest blog posts, filtered, sorted and limited as you choose.

Field binding connects an element on a page, such as a heading, image or link, to a field of a content item, so the element shows that item's value instead of fixed text.

A collection page is one page design that shows every item of a CMS collection, each at its own address, such as /blog/my-first-post for each post in a blog.

A git-based CMS is a content management system that stores content as files in your site's git repository and saves edits as commits, instead of keeping it in a separate database.

A headless CMS stores and serves content through an API without deciding how it looks, so any site or app can fetch the content and render it in its own design.

Draft mode is a way for a site to show unpublished content to editors, such as a draft post in a CMS, while visitors keep seeing only what has been published.

A URL folder is a part of a web address that groups pages under it, such as services in /services/web-design, so the address shows where a page sits in the site.

A slug is the last part of a page's address, written in lowercase words joined by hyphens, such as my-first-post in /blog/my-first-post.

A redirect sends a visitor or search engine from one address to another, such as from a page's old address to its new one after it moves.

A sitemap is a map of a website's pages: for planning, a tree of pages and how they nest; for search engines, an XML file that lists every page a crawler should find.

A canonical URL is the one address a page declares as its main version, with a link rel="canonical" tag, so search engines combine duplicates under it.

Structured data is machine-readable information about a page, usually JSON-LD in the schema.org vocabulary, that tells search engines and AI tools what the page is about.

Open Graph is a set of meta tags, such as og:title, og:description and og:image, that decides the title, text and picture shown when a page is shared in social media and chats.

Prerendering builds a page's HTML ahead of time, at build time, so the content is in the page when it loads instead of being drawn later by JavaScript.

An orphan page is a page no other page links to, so visitors can't find it by clicking around and search engines may miss it or treat it as unimportant.

Anchor text is the visible, clickable words of a link, which tell readers and search engines what the linked page is about.

Alt text is a short written description of an image, set in its alt attribute, that screen readers read aloud and that shows when the image can't load.

WebP is an image format for the web that stores photos and graphics in much smaller files than JPEG or PNG at similar quality, with support for transparency and animation.

AVIF is a modern image format, based on the AV1 video codec, that often makes photos even smaller than WebP at the same visual quality.

A preview deployment is a temporary, private copy of a website built from a branch or pull request, so changes can be checked at a real address before they go live.

A branch preview is a running copy of a website from one git branch, so work on that branch can be seen and tested without changing the live site.

Staging is a copy of a website where changes are checked before they go live, usually built from a separate branch and kept away from visitors and search engines.

A restore point is a saved state of a website you can go back to in one step if a later change goes wrong.

Custom code is HTML, usually a script or meta tag, added to every page of a site (or one page) for things like analytics, chat widgets, fonts or site verification.