Glossary of Terms

403 Page/"Access Denied"
The page that gets displayed when a user goes to a page that is unpublished, or an intranet page that they do not have sufficient permissions to view.

404 Page/"Page Not Found"
The page that gets displayed when a user goes to a page or path that does not exist. "Page Not Found"

Accessibility 
The inclusive practice of removing barriers that prevent interaction with, or access to websites, by people with disabilities. When sites are correctly designed, developed and edited, all users have equal access to information and functionality.

Admin Menu
Menu bar available at the top of your site after you log in for performing actions on the site. You must have a Site Manager, Editor, or Contributor role on your site in order to see it. The contents of the menu will be dependent on your role.

Alternative Text (Alt Text)
The text describing an image.

Banner Image
A large image, most often displayed at the top of the page. A Banner Image that appears elsewhere on the page is sometimes called an "In Page Banner."

Brand Bar
The horizontal element at the top of most official Stanford websites. It is usually Cardinal Red and contains the wordmark for Stanford University. Dictated by the Stanford Identity Guidelines. 

Button
A link that is visually styled in order to give it more emphasis.

Cache
A version of your web page that is stored so that page requests can be served faster; data stored in a cache is usually the result of an request for the page.

Call to Action (CTA)
Editorial/marketing term, to highlight an action needed to be taken by a user; interaction (link or button) whereby a content author can induce/encourage a user to do something

Card
One of the primary building block components of a website. Stanford Sites Card Paragraph comes with several optional fields to create content flexibility, including media, subhead, headline, description, CTA text link, and button. 

Content Area
The part of an individual webpage that is unique to that page, and can be edited from that page. This typically includes the page title and any content specific to that page. This does not include any headers, footers, or menus that are available across multiple pages on the site.

Content Management System (CMS)
In the context of a website: a collection of tools designed to allow the creation, modification, organization, search, retrieval, and removal of data, content, and information.

Drupal
An open-source content management system (CMS) which enables you to store content and display that content on a webpage.

Global Footer
The non-editable section at the bottom of the page with Stanford wordmark that includes required links for official Stanford websites. Dictated by the Stanford Identity Guidelines. 

Header
This usually refers to the section below the brand bar (if it is present) and above the editable content area on all pages of a site. It is also sometimes called the Masthead. A horizontal container including the title, search, main nav, Stanford “lockup” or other site title/name (or logo if approved).

Header can also refer to the non-visible HTML element that holds metadata about a page.

Headline
An editorial description of the subsequent text field(s), that is the highest level of priority within its context (headline of a card, or a headline of a page). “Headline” in the context of HTML, should always be a semantic heading,  H1, H2, H3, H4, H5, or H6. 

Hero / Banner / Hero Banner
A component that is often at the top of a page and often spans the width of the browser (or is a wide content area). Editorially, this component is meant to highlight, feature, or call out content. It can include overlay text with links or buttons and/or video.

Home Page
The main page of a website that visitors land on when they navigate to the site's root URL (e.g. engineering.stanford.edu).

HTML Headings
H1, H2, H3, H4, H5, H6. These are used to provide page structure, both visually and for other purposes (SEO, accessibility.) https://www.w3schools.com/html/html_headings.asp

Image Styles
Image styles determine how an image is displayed and can include resizing or cropping options. 

Intranet
A site that is only available to users who log in.

Jump-to Link
Links that direct visitors to a specific part of a page, rather than the entire page itself. This is useful for faster access to referencing content that is further down the page.

Launch
The process of making a site "live" to the public. In the context of Stanford Sites, a site is launched when it has a three part URL (for example, https://sitesuserguide.stanford.edu rather than https://userguide20230625.sites.stanford.edu/.) Other common launch activities include making the site visible to search engines, submitting the sitemap to search engines, removing all placeholder content, adding redirects, ensuring that the site is compliant with accessibility, and enabling more caching on the site for faster loading.

Local Footer 
The site-specific footer which sits right above Stanford's Global Footer on all site pages. A local footer will likely include the Unit Signature (or custom logo), physical address, contact information, links and/or menus, social media, and/or other types of content that end users would benefit from access to having in this global position across a site. Cf. Global Footer. 

Manage Content
The page where users can view, sort, and filter all the content on their site. It is also useful for performing bulk operations on multiple pages.

Module
A block of code in Drupal which provides some functionality. Modules may be part of Drupal core or are contributed by members of the Drupal open source community. Modules must be enabled and in some cases configured to work properly.

Node
A unit of content stored in Drupal’s database with a unique identifier A node may be a page, a blog post, a news article, etc. The page you are viewing now is a node.

Navigation (also known as Menu)
A list of links with high visual importance that allow end-users to visit different pages of the website by clicking, tapping, or keyboard navigating. Navigation displays all of or parts of the information architecture and its hierarchy of pages. 

Paragraph
A unit of content that has a specific set of fields and formats. Paragraphs are also sometimes called Components. See Banner, Card, Text Area for examples of paragraph types.

Page
A generic term used to describe a web page (what you see when you navigate to a specific URL on a web site). Stanford Sites also has a content type known as Basic Page.

Parent
Objects can have hierarchical relationships, such as menu items, taxonomy terms, paths, and more. A parent link usually refers to the menu item that a child link is nested under. For example, if one were to have a menu that had a link to a People overview page, and then a link to a Faculty page nested underneath, the People overview page would be the "parent."

Path
A unique part of the URL that falls right after the domain that leads the visitor for a specific function or piece of content. For example, for a page whose full URL is "http://sitesuserguide.stanford.edu/get-started", the path is "/get-started".

Permission
A setting that controls access to content and functionality within a Drupal site. For example, editing the Local Footer is a permission that is only available to the Site Manager roles on Stanford Sites.

Published/Unpublished
The state of a page or a paragraph that determines if it can be viewed by anonymous visitors to the website. Website editors can hide pages or paragraphs from the public by unchecking the "Published" setting on the page or paragraph edit form. Pages that are added automatically to the site through an importer can only be unpublished by the importer. Unpublishing a piece of content is less destructive than deleting it.

Platform
A platform is sometimes described as a set of software and a surrounding ecosystem of resources. For Stanford Sites and related services, this is inclusive of the infrastructure, product, and service provided by Stanford Web Services.  

Primary Navigation (also known as Main Menu)
The first level of navigation in a site’s information architecture, below the homepage. (Not “tabs”, not “main nav”, not “top-level nav”...) Lives in the Header/Masthead region. 

Release Notes (also known as changelogs)
Release Notes contain information regarding any major update to the Stanford Sites platform.

Revisions
Revisions track previous states of page. Stanford Sites retains the last 5 revisions of a page. Revisions may be "reverted" to return to an earlier state of the page.

Roles
The set of permissions given to a user that defines what they are and are not able to do on the site. In the context of Stanford Sites Intranet, roles may also be used to allow access to view specific content.

Secondary Navigation (also known as secondary or sidebar menu)
The second level of navigation within your site’s information architecture. It often resides in the left sidebar of a page, as part of the side navigation/sub-navigation. It may also be made visible in a Drop-Down Menu.

Section
A part of the content area of a webpage that can be divided into columns.

Side Navigation
The level of navigation within your site’s information architecture that correlates with the webpage’s position in the navigation hierarchy. It often resides in the left sidebar of a page, as part of the side navigation/sub-navigation.

Site Title/Lockup
The Stanford-branded wordmark at the top of your site that includes the Stanford name, the name of the school (e.g. Engineering, Earth, etc. if applicable), and the title of your site. Dictated by the Stanford Identity Guidelines. 

Subhead / Superhead
A text style inside a component that sits above a headline. This style is meant to act to provide additional information about the content.

Summary Text
A trimmed, formatted version of a text field or body content, usually the first paragraph or two of body content.

Taxonomy
Sometimes called a Tag, Taxonomy Term, or Term. A label that is assigned to content on your site to group it into categories for organization, display or filtering purposes. 

Title 
A semantic HTML element typically derived from your page title. This appears in your browser tab or shortcut. It often takes the form of (page title | sitename)

Title (page): 
The h1 element on a page. There must be only one page title on a page.

URL Redirects
When your old site is replaced by a new site, the paths to your pages may change from your old site to your new site. URL Redirects can map URLs from your page paths to the new pages on your new site so as to avoid having broken links. Redirects can also be used to create a shorter URL to page.

User
An account on the site that can be assigned a role. The user may or may not be authenticated (e.g. anonymous user) or SUNet user.

UX
Short for "User Experience"; the goal of UX design in business is to improve customer satisfaction and loyalty through the utility and ease of use in the interaction with a product.

View
A Drupal term that indicates a method for creating lists of content. Used in the Lists paragraph type and on Stanford Sites' automated pages for People, Publications, Events, News, and Courses.

Vocabulary
A collection of tags or taxonomy terms. In the context of Stanford Sites, "Person Type" or "Event Type" are vocabularies.

Workgroup
A list of members in a group, identified by their SUNet IDs, and given a name that uniquely identifies it. A workgroup has two parts: a stem (before the colon) is the workgroup's owner, and the ID (after the colon) is the specific name of the group. For example, the workgroup "gsb:affiliates" has the stem "gsb" and the ID "affiliates". Workgroups are used in a variety of Stanford systems because they can be defined independently of any specific application. For example, a workgroup can be used to set the members of a mailing list, or the list of Site Contributors on a Stanford site, or a group of people who are given permission to access a folder on Google Drive, and so forth. See workgroup.stanford.edu for more details.

WYSIWYG / Text Area
Short for "What You See Is What You Get"; a visual HTML editor usually found in modern web editors that allows easier formatting of content without coding directly in HTML. The WYSIWYG editor may be set to strip out certain types of HTML or javascript.