Here’s a reorganized and reformatted version of the transcript with clear section headings, subtitles, and topic breaks to make it easier to follow and reference:

Understanding Website Jargon and Infrastructure

Presenter: Becky

Introduction

Meet Becky

• Been with Oozle Media for almost 8 years (since May).
• Background: Web development and marketing.
• Personal touch: Loves cats and quirky shirts.
• Fun fact: The cats in her intro slide aren’t all hers—one is her sister’s friend’s cat (Meatball), one is a roommate’s (Remy), and one is hers (Peaches).

Why Websites Are Confusing

The Jargon Problem

• Common web terms: API, cache, CTA, favicon, plugin, redirect, registrar.
• Many clients feel overwhelmed by acronyms and tech terms.
• Goal: Demystify the components that make a website work.

How Websites Work: The Key Components

Website as a Physical Building Analogy

• Domain = Your address (e.g., 123 Beauty School Lane).
• DNS = The map/directory that connects your address to the right location.
• Hosting = Your actual building or structure.
• CMS = The layout/design inside your building.
• CRM/Forms = Your visitor sign-in system.
• Tracking & Analytics = Your security cameras (monitor who comes and goes).

Domains & DNS Explained

What is a Domain?

• The URL people type to find your website.
• Example: www.beautyschool.edu
• Managed by registrars like GoDaddy, Google Domains, Namecheap, and EDUCAUSE.

What is DNS?

• Connects your domain to the right destination.
• Essential for linking your domain to hosting, email, and subdomains.
• Providers: Cloudflare, Namecheap, etc.
• Note: EDUCAUSE domains require separate DNS hosting (e.g., Cloudflare works best).

If You Don’t Know Where Your Domain Is Registered:

• Use a “WhoIs” lookup tool online.
• Look for clues (e.g., “Domains by Proxy” usually = GoDaddy).
• Important: Always maintain access to your domain to ensure full control.

Changing Your Domain Name

Scenario Example

• A school launched a new site with a fresh domain after losing access to their old one.
• Result: Gradual increase in site visits and leads, with local SEO playing a major role.

Tips for a Smooth Domain Change

• Implement wildcard redirects from the old domain to the new one.
• Update your Google Business Profile to reflect the new domain.
• Update all materials (catalogs, social media, brochures, etc.).
• Monitor traffic to ensure you’re not losing visibility.
• Keep the old domain active (with redirects) for at least 6 months.

Hosting: Where Your Website Lives

Hosting Basics

Types of Hosting:

1. Shared Hosting – Cheaper, but shared with others (slower if someone else’s site is busy).
2. Dedicated Hosting – Your own server, better performance.
3. Cloud Hosting – For big companies like Amazon and Walmart.

What to Look For

• Good uptime.
• Regular backups (weekly/monthly is ideal).
• Security (SSL certificates).
• Enough storage (20GB is plenty for most small schools).
• Adequate bandwidth for expected traffic.

Popular Hosting Providers

• SiteGround
• WP Engine (more robust)
• GoDaddy (all-in-one options: domain, DNS, and hosting)

Why Hosting Speed Matters

• Google ranks faster websites higher.
• Slow sites = bad user experience = lost leads.
• Tools like Google PageSpeed Insights help diagnose loading issues.
• Hosting impacts how fast the first content appears—this can make or break a user’s patience.

Content Management Systems (CMS) & CRMs

CMS: How Your Website is Built

What is a CMS?

• The platform used to build and manage your website content.

Common Platforms:

• WordPress (used by Oozle, with advanced custom fields for easier editing)
• Elementor/Divi – Visual builders with more flexibility but higher complexity
• Others: Wix, Squarespace, Webflow

WordPress Pros

• Highly customizable
• Easy for clients to use with the right setup
• Works well with a wide range of plugins and tools

CRM Integration: Managing Leads

Why CRMs Should Connect to Your Website

• Ensures form submissions go directly to your CRM.
• Better lead management and faster response times.

How the Connection Works:

• Gravity Forms (used by Oozle) supports direct integration via:
  • API/Webhooks – Real-time form-to-CRM syncing.
  • Zapier – Acts as a translator between form and CRM.

Avoid iFrame Embeds

• Some CRMs provide code that creates an iframe form on your site.
• Looks fine but loads slower, may not match your site’s design, and doesn’t track well.
• Always better to use integrated forms (like Gravity Forms) with proper field mapping.

Final Tips and Takeaways

Key Reminders

• Understand your infrastructure: Domain, DNS, hosting, CMS, CRM.
• Maintain access to your domain and hosting accounts.
• Plan properly if changing your domain—redirects and updates are crucial.
• Choose a hosting provider with good support, speed, and security.
• Make sure your forms talk to your CRM using reliable integrations.
• Fast, user-friendly sites are essential for capturing leads and improving search rankings.

View Transcript: 

Becky:
Thanks Chris. We have a Mac set up, so I have someone helping me set up, so hopefully everyone can see this. So yes, I have been on the web dev side of US Media for a few years. I’ve been here for almost eight years. It’ll be eight years in May. So of course you have to start off with introducing me. I feel like my entire personality is cats and fun shirts. This is the more mild one I would say. I didn’t wear a cat shirt today, so of course I’ve got a picture of hilariously, not even my cat, that is my sister’s friend’s, cat Meatball. And then we’ve got good old Remy who is my roommate’s cat, and then my cat is Peaches. So I feel like if I’m not doing marketing things, I’m usually again around cats I feel like is just how my life has gone.

(00:48):
But of course you’re here for the meat of the presentation. What I know is that websites come with a ton of jargon. So these were just some that I could come up with on the top of my head. API cash, CT, a, favicon, plugin, redirect, registrar. How many do you know? Lots of acronyms, lots of terms. I get it. And I will say that is one of the biggest things that we run into with clients who are like, I don’t know what I need. Why are you not telling me what I need? I’m looking at you guys. You guys are the experts. So when we’re going to go launch a new website, there are kind of, here’s the main overview of the few pieces that you need. So think of your website, like your school building. Now we like to make the analogy that all roads lead to Rome and Rome being your website.

(01:44):
Your website also can be categorized like your physical school building. So you have your domain, which is your address, like if you’re at 1, 2, 3 Beauty School, 1, 2, 3 road example. And then you have the DNS, which connects to your domain. And from there the DNS points to your hosting. And from there, what lives on your hosting is your CMS or the website files. And then from there you have your CRM in forms and you have tracking and analytics. So they all kind of work together. I would say these are kind of the main things that you want to keep in mind when we’re trying to get your new website launched. So I’m going to go into at least a bit of each piece. So we’re going to start off with domains and the DNS. So what’s a domain? Your domain is your website’s address. It’s what students type in to find you online.

(02:40):
You connect your domain to your DNS via name servers. They’ll look something like NS one.example.com, NS two, you usually have two. So that’s totally normal. Domain registrars include GoDaddy, Google Domains, name cheap edu. Cause is also a domain registrar. Now on the flip side you also have the DNS. So the DNS is the domain name system that connects your domain to your website and then it essentially is kind of that hub that connects everything else and allows you to do all of the things that you need to do. So for example, once you’ve pointed your domain to A DNS, that DNS is then pointed to your hosting. It’s pointed to your email provider. It’s also where you can create subdomains for landing pages. We talked about what Dave Steiner talked about earlier. DNS providers usually include stuff like CloudFlare, name, cheap, et cetera. Now as a note, many domain registrars include DNS services.

(03:39):
The only exception to this is edu cause. So if you have a.edu domain, you are going to have to have some type of DN s service. I feel like we’ve had the best of luck with CloudFlare, and I’ve heard inklings that GoDaddy doesn’t play well with Ed cause. So that’s something to note that if you’re like, oh, I gave you Edca logins, why can’t you launch my website? And it’s usually because we need that extra piece. Now what happens if you don’t know where your domain is? You don’t know where you’ve registered your domain. So there are a lot of tools online. You can use what is called a who is Lookup. There’s some rules, some laws that you have to have your information hooked to your domain. So you are registering your name with your domain saying, yes, I am the one who bought it.

(04:24):
I am the one who owned it. So you can use literal, you can Google who is lookup and you can get a tool and it’s going to show you information like this. Now you’ll see registrant and you’ll see a name registration, private, and you see an organization domains by proxy LLC, and you’re like, well, this isn’t helpful. So this is where there’s a little bit of nuance because actually this does tell me quite a bit because what I’ve learned is that Domains by Proxy is a GoDaddy company. And so essentially when this person bought their domain, they chose that extra service to hide their information via domains by proxy, which means that it was probably registered under GoDaddy. If you do not own your domain, if you cannot get into the GoDaddy account, you can’t find out where your name servers are hosted, you should get access to this.

(05:17):
We have a lot of competitors who love to say, oh, I’ll just purchase the domain for you. And then when they move from that company, move on from that company and try to launch their new website, it’s like, okay, how do I launch my website? Well, we need domain access. We don’t have that. So do try to get access to your domain so that you can have control when you want to launch a new website. GoDaddy also has a lot of help resources. If it is a God, I feel like GoDaddy is the most common, so I wanted to include that. They have a big process that you can do where it’s like, oh, I bought the domain years ago. They have some ways that you can recover that account as well. Next, what happens if you’re like, you know what? I want to change my domain.

(06:03):
I want to say, okay, I’m tired of having this really long name. I’m the American Beauty School of Cosmetology and Barbering. I’m so sorry. I’m sure that’s a real client name. And then maybe they’re just like, you know what? I’d rather just have it be like abs.edu. That’s a really dumb example. Don’t have your website Be abs. So this is real results from a client. This is a screenshot from Google Analytics and Google Search Console. They work together to kind of tell you the experience about how people are getting your website and how many people are visiting your site. So we launched this website on July, somewhere mid July. You can see you don’t see any data before July. So this was a client that was like, you know what? I can’t find my old domain. Why don’t I just buy a new one? And we launch fresh.

(06:55):
So we were so fortunate to see immediately, okay, we started seeing some traffic. That red line is about when they started getting leads. So even though we launched in July, we didn’t really see students coming through the door like people saying, Hey, I’m interested in learning this school until mid August at the earliest. We also noticed again, Google Search Console is where it’s like, okay, what terms are people using to find your site? You’ll notice that it started from zero and it’s slowly inching its way up. It’s always fun to see little trends like this where it’s like, oh, it then dropped. You can kind of account for a lot of things that actually Miranda was talking about where it’s like the market can change this. The other thing that can change this is seasonality. So the fact that it kind of dropped during Christmas time feels pretty normal for a school.

(07:44):
Now next, the other key piece of why this worked was because of local SEO. So when we launched that new website to that brand new fresh domain, our biggest thing was we want to make sure that if someone searches the name of this school, that new website shows up. So essentially when we went in, we said, okay, we know that if someone clicks on that website button, they had better get to the right spot and not a broken link. So anyone can change the information on a Google business profile. Anyone can recommend the changes. We also didn’t have access to this Google Business profile to just make that change. So we had a lot of people at us being like, okay, Google, this is the correct address, send people here instead. And that’s where we started seeing results because we were checking it like, okay, is it showing the correct website?

(08:39):
Is it showing the correct website? If someone goes to the site, is it going to the correct link or is it going to the broken link? So key factors, if you are changing your domain, it’s not the end of the world. And some people are like, oh, is it a good idea? Is it a bad idea? If it’s done right, it shouldn’t have a big impact. If it’s done wrong, that’s when you run into some issues. So always implement redirects. There’s a thing called a wildcard redirect. That means that anytime that you go to that domain, it’s going to automatically push users to your new domain. So that’s something that you set up through the DNS. So again, update your Google business profile to match the new domain, exactly. Update any links that you can. Say you have a school catalog, you have flyers, you have social media profiles.

(09:27):
Anything that you have control over to update to that new website, you should do that part of it while we have that wild card redirect in play. This is where it helps in saying brand recognition. So people can look at your website and go, oh, okay, this is the correct spot. Also monitor traffic and rankings to ensure smooth transition. You don’t want to see a sudden, obviously with a new domain, you’re going to have it hooked to different analytics, so you don’t want to see a sudden drop that then doesn’t come back up. If it doesn’t come back up, then that’s a concern. And then of course, try to keep the old domain active with that redirect. You can have it going for as long as you’d like, I’d say at least for six months as people get used to that new domain. Next piece hosting.

(10:15):
I get a lot of hosting questions. So let’s talk about how to choose the right platform to host your website. So again, talking about all that pieces, you have the domain and DNS. That’s your name. Hosting is where your site files live. So the most common hosting options, you don’t necessarily need to know this. There’s shared hosting which is cheaper. Essentially what that means is that you have a bunch of people on the same server. And so if one website on that shared server is getting a ton of traffic, then it might slow your site down because all of the resources are being taken by someone else. You have that dedicated hosting, which means you have your own server. So anyone who visits your site is just going to control that one server. And then don’t even worry about cloud hosting. This is for the Amazons, the Walmarts.

(11:05):
It’s those people where it’s like there’s always going to be some server available to host your website to showcase your website to make sure that it’s always up. I would say the biggest things to focus on are look for something that provides good uptime, offers backups, and is secure. So what hosting plan do I need? I would say on average a small school is not going to have a website that is bigger than 20 gigabytes of data. However, if you’re following a good SEO strategy, that means that you should be constantly blogging and adding more content to your website, which does give the opportunity that you might need to upgrade. For multi-location schools, you’re probably going to need more than 20 gigabytes of storage. Or even if you don’t use it immediately again, you’ll start to grow. And then that will encourage more storage. So the things to look for, try to include an SSL that is, I forget what the acronym is, but it’s the S part of the H-T-T-P-S.

(12:13):
It tells Google that your site is secure and it’s who you are. Make sure they offer regular backups. We’ve had some clients who are like, oh, I want a daily backup. I don’t think that’s necessary to have a backup daily because the real matter is that you’re not going into your website every day and making changes. I would aim for weekly or monthly because that’s saying that if something goes wrong, then you have a way to back up and only lose a little bit of data, data being form entries. But again, you should have other options. We just had a great CRM presentation where you’ll already have those leads and I’ll talk a little bit more. Next thing is bandwidth and traffic. Does the plan accommodate the average number of site visitors you get? So if you’re getting 150 site visitors a month, do you have enough bandwidth to accommodate that many?

(13:07):
If you have a sudden spike, will you be able to have that? I will say, I think Site Ground and many other hosting providers offer this unlimited bandwidth. And it’s really funny because if you read the fine print, they’re like, as long as you stay within our parameters, it’s unlimited. And then of course, look for speed and uptime guarantees because you want to make sure that your site is fast and you want to make sure it doesn’t go down. So I would say some popular hosting providers, of course our site ground WP Engine is another more robust and expensive one. And I’d say that GoDaddy also has been a common hosting provider. So like GoDaddy offers DNS domain and hosting services, a lot of them do kind of all three. Now, sife, why SIFE matters, Google prioritizes fast loading sites in search rankings. So I remembered this client that we used to have and they had their own custom hosting server.

(14:05):
They had a guy that was like, I will take care of the hosting on your website. Don’t even worry about it. But we ran into so many issues because their site would just randomly go down. The other thing to note, so this is page speed Insights by Google. It is a tool we use to try to figure out how fast the website is. Essentially it’ll ping the website, figure out how long it takes to load, and then give you results and then give you options to improve it and it’ll say, Hey, these are the steps that you should take to improve it. So the thing that I want to point out is in the bottom right, you’ll see that tree map. So at the very beginning you’ll see that it’s white screen, white screen, white screen, and then something loads in. So that’s the first content, full paint I believe is what that’s called.

(14:46):
And so it took that long for your web browser to connect to that hosting provider to then load anything. And of course, we know that beauty school students, they want to be fast. They want to look at that and say, okay, well it didn’t load immediately, so I’m just going to leave. And so that’s where that really impacts. Size feed is so important because you don’t want someone to leave because they think your site is broken. Okay, next, content Management Systems and CRMs. So what is A CMS? So it is essentially the platform, how your website is built. So the CRM or the gosh, so many acronyms, the CMS is on your site files on your hosting. So your web developer often dictates the CMS that you use. So you should look to find a developer who uses the CMS that you want to use.

(15:41):
So the most common platforms at uel, we use WordPress. They also offer plugins that offer kind of a different user experience. So we use a variation of advanced custom fields. We have a template that we code that makes it a lot easier to just edit content. And I will say we have bright success that anyone can edit their website, at least for the content and images. We run into some things where people are like, I can’t change the colors. That’s because you have visual builders like Elementor and Divvy, which do allow you to change the colors, but they’re going to be a lot harder to use. Of course, other CMS platforms or Wix, Squarespace, Webflow, I would say that it’s not necessarily that there are huge pros and cons. Some CMSs are better in terms of they just have more robust tools or they have more design elements.

(16:36):
I would say that WordPress is one of those where it’s the safest because there’s the most open functionality. So it’s like, well, okay, I want to see what it looks like as I’m designing it, and there are plugins allowed to replicate that versus Wix or Squarespace, which might have limits on their builders. Of course. Next, as we just had a presentation about this, I was so excited when I saw that she mentioned, Hey, your CRM should connect to your website. Hey, we agree. You need to be able to connect your CRM to your website, and you have to determine how forms are created on your website. So at uel we use gravity forms. I will say that the majority of CRMs do connect to Gravity forms in some way. We either have it through a webhooks, which is a direct connection to the CRM via an A-P-I-U-R-L.

(17:31):
You don’t have to worry about the specifics of that. What that is saying is that when you submit a gravity form, it’s going to map the field. So it’s say, okay, gravity Forms has a first and last name field in the CRM, it’s going to have a first and last name field and it’s going to auto-populate. The other thing that is really cool is that there is a tool called Zapier, and that spoofs a connection. So essentially what happens is that you’ll fill it out on Gravity Forms, it’ll go through a Zapier and it’ll zap, and then from there, it translates that data in a way that fits the CRM. So there are multiple ways to do that. I would say the biggest trick with CRMs is avoid embedding CRM forms using iframes. Every once in a while we have a client who comes to us and says, Hey, my CRM company gave me this set of code.

(18:23):
Just put it on the website and we look at it and go, that’s an iframe. So they want us to remove the gravity form and put their fake form on there. Now, on paper, it looks okay and it can look the same. The problem is that iframes can be sometimes inconsistent and slow, so they might take a little bit more time to load in. Sometimes it doesn’t play nice with our templates. And then the other thing, of course, that uel we’re very focused on being able to give names and numbers and say, Hey, look, these are how many potential students we brought your school. If you have a CRM with an iframe, we don’t have that extra benefit of being able to capture those names because it’s only going to your CRM. We don’t have the extra protection of it. Also going through gravity forms.

(19:09):
The other trick with the gravity forms is it allows us to set up email notifications for our clients. And that essentially anytime that a lead is submitted, then it allows you to, it’ll auto send to your admissions team and say, okay, here is the name, phone number, who to call, and what form it came through. So you’ll notice when we launch websites, we often have to set up what is called an SMTP. It is a simple mail transfer protocol. It allows us to say, it is the connection that says, Hey, we’re sending this email from no reply@yourdomain.com, and it is safe. Next, let’s talk about maintaining your website. I know I’m running out of time, so I’m going to blaze through this. So we also get a lot of questions of how do I maintain your website? What should I be doing? So make sure everything is up to date plugins and software content security tools.

(20:04):
Do all of the things. You can kind of screenshot this where it’s like, update them monthly, update the content as needed. It doesn’t have to be, again, a daily change. Do monthly security checks and do backups again, weekly or monthly. The reason you want to do all of these updates is because you want to make sure your site is secure. That is usually the biggest thing. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen phone updates where it’s like, oh, we have this update because it needed to patch some security things. I see that all the time. Now, when do you start seeing results? This was a real client that we launched in February. Again, I don’t know. Oh no, the other one was July. We’re good. This one launched in February. We didn’t see an uptick on that Google search console until August, and that is akay.

(20:52):
It takes time for things to populate, to crawl, things like that. And we are also regularly blogging. And so they had additional content for Google to crawl and rank. And of course, make sure that your site is launch ready. Make sure you own your domain and you have DNS access. Make sure your hosting is reliable. Make sure your SEO team has done redirects. They’ve optimized the title tags and meta descriptions. Make sure that you have a plan to make sure it’s fast. Integrate your CRM with gravity forms. Make sure the forms work, and then make sure any tracking that you have on your site is implemented. There you go. And that’s it. If you have any questions, please feel free to email me. I’m so sorry that I am a minute over. Hopefully that is fine.

Chris:
You’re in for going one minute over. That’s totally fine. So much good information. I know that I am going to be sending this presentation to so many clients and perspective clients as a tool, as reference. Everybody put in the chat a big thank you to Becky because this information compiling all of this is so important, especially you’re the owner, you’re the director, you have to know these things. And being educated on it and how it works is really, really important and helpful. So great session.