What this means to a client

• Observing ADA Compliance guidelines is the law.
• Observing these guidelines is good for the end users and good for SEO.

Hosting refers to the server achitecture that runs and supports a website.

If a website’s “back end” is the behind-the-scenes code and filesystem that keeps it running, the “front end” is the glitz and glamor you see on the page.

An often misused term, the “back end” of a website refers to the code, database, filesystem, and server that keeps a website functioning. Often conflated with granting “login access” to WordPress’ admin area.

What “back end” means for a WordPress site:

• WordPress is coded in the PHP language
• The servers run on NGINX (but can also run on Apache)
• The database is MySQL

We never give anyone except the EOS web team privileges to these parts of the website.

A blog is a portion of a website dedicated to regularly publishing content relevant to the site’s brand, industry or community. Like social networks, it represents a significant commitment to develop consistent, quality content on the part of either the blog owner or a third-party service.

What this means to a client:

• Blogs can be helpful to rural or community-oriented practices that intend to build a readership through quality content about dental health, local events, community involvement, etc.
• They also require active attention from a dedicated individual or team, working to publish and promote relevant content for a specific audience.
• Blogs can improve SEO ranking, but only if the content is considered a certain quality– low-effort content filled with keywords is unlikely to improve SEO performance.

What this means to us

• Creating a blog requires designing a clean template for individual posts that can be styled easily by the blog’s author/owner.
• It also requires building a clean Blog page to list the individual posts, as well as the way the individual posts display on that page.
• Archive and category pages that populate over time based on content will also require additional work.

If a website’s “back end” is the behind-the-scenes code and filesystem that keeps it running, the “front end” is the glitz and glamor you see on the page.

If a website’s “back end” is the behind-the-scenes code and filesystem that keeps it running, the “front end” is the glitz and glamor you see on the page.

If a website’s “back end” is the behind-the-scenes code and filesystem that keeps it running, the “front end” is the glitz and glamor you see on the page.

A custom post type is a way to define a repeating section–a templated page for a product on an online store, or a case study page. Typically custom post types have categories or tags. A blog with posts is an example of a custom post type that already exists in a default WordPress installation. 

Where sites are made up of pages – and blogs are made up of posts – a custom post type is basically an additional type of website structure, very much like pages or posts.

Think of an item for sale in an online store, and how every results page lists sales items identically, and each page you click into to view the item looks exactly the same. Nobody designed each individual page for every individual product. A custom post type was created (“product”), and the properties of a “product” filter in through results pages and sales-item pages to display things like an author, customer reviews and ratings, years or anything else that may be important.

Custom post types require considerably more up-front planning and investment to successfully structure the site in a logical way. Getting too far into the process without nailing this step could be disastrous down the line.

Where needs are concerned, it’s more about the doctor having a deep body of work that requires them to talk at length about individual cases, show before-and-after pictures, describe the procedure, that kind of thing.

It speaks more to their customers’ need to feel confident about their cosmetic work and connected to the doctor specifically, similar to an artist’s portfolio.

Custom post types are very similar to implement a blog, but typically more complex.

We need to:

1. Plan a logical structure to “drop in” the content.
2. Design custom page elements/modules to display some pieces of information in some places, and other pieces in others.
3. Collect all of the doctor’s content and enter it all into the back-end.

There is no quick or standard way to do this. It rearranges our usual design process and makes the initial investment much more involved. Custom post types potentially represent at least a dozen hours of additional work at minimum.

If a website’s “back end” is the behind-the-scenes code and filesystem that keeps it running, the “front end” is the glitz and glamor you see on the page.

A dropdown is a section of navigation that opens to display more pages, either when you hover over or click on it.

A site’s footer is a global element (i.e. it’s built once and lives everywhere) that sits at the bottom of every page of a website. Its primary purpose is to frame and lend context to the site’s overall structure or purpose, providing easy access to other areas of the site when the user reaches the bottom of the page. 

If a website’s “back end” is the behind-the-scenes code and filesystem that keeps it running, the “front end” is the glitz and glamor you see on the page.

Functionality is a basic catch-all term for anything interactive on a website. Functionality can be anything from hover effects to modals and popups. If the user is able to interact with an object on the page, we consider that “functionality.”

What functionality is not: anchor links (and buttons that only act as links). While links technically “do something” when you click on them, they are too basic to be considered an example of functionality. 

Examples of functionality:

• On-screen animations (e.g. fading, sliding, spinning, etc.)
• Contact forms
• Drop-down menus
• Sliders and carousels
• On-hover effects (e.g. image darkens on hover, button changes on hover, etc.)
• Accordions and toggles
• Pop-ups

Hosting refers to the server achitecture that runs and supports a website.

The secondary navigation is usually the topmost element on the page (visible in the corner of the image). It’s where we typically put things like social media links, phone numbers, and email addresses for quick access by a user.

Some sites are complex enough that we’ll put additional menu items in the secondary nav.

Analytics: Choosing keywords relevant to the client and their market, and incorporating them throughout our strategy.
Writing/Copy: Utilizing the data-driven keywords in our site content to generate a perception of “relevance” in search engines.
Design: Solving for a specific problem/pain point and employing design concepts to encourage a specific user behavior on-site.
Tech: Populating keywords appropriately in the back-end meta of our site, as well as following best practices for how the copy is implemented into the site structure, image descriptions and filenames, anchor tags, site security and mapping, page speed, and a variety of other techniques that encourage search engines to rank our sites