Glossary · Other

HTML

Hypertext Markup Language

In plain language

The language web pages are written in; it tells a browser what is a heading, a paragraph, a link or an image.

The metaphor

Like the outline of a document: it marks which line is the title, which is a paragraph and which is a picture, before any styling.

Going deeper

How it works

Tags mark each piece of a page, such as headings, paragraphs, links and images.
Search engines and screen readers rely on that structure to understand the page.
Email is also built in HTML, which is why signatures and newsletters can look different in different mail apps.

What can go wrong (example scenario)

A four-person consultancy pasted a Word document into their site editor. The page came out as one giant block with no headings, invisible to search engines and unreadable on a phone. A simple HTML structure would have put them on the first page for their own name.

How WILDCARD handles it

Managed Hosting runs the site. Email Signatures handles the one piece of HTML every business sends daily: a signature that renders the same in every mail client.

In practice

A dental office's page needs a real heading structure so search engines show its services.
A law firm's email signature is built in HTML so it renders the same in Outlook and on phones.
A retailer's product pages need alt text on images for accessibility and search.

Example scenario: A small physiotherapy clinic's new website looked beautiful on the designer's screen and broken on every phone. The HTML had been exported from a design tool with fixed widths. Rebuilding the templates with proper structure made the site readable on mobile, where most of their bookings came from.