Below are a list of terms that are frequently used by the Web Production team, organized by the following categories:

A/B Testing: A method of comparing two versions of a web page against each other to determine which one performs better.

Above the fold (ATF): Top portion of the webpage that is visible without scrolling down when the page first loads.

Absolute URL: The absolute URL is the entire URL that shows up on the browser’s web address bar. Ex: https://www.ed.gov/ 

BAU:  Business As Usual

Breakpoint: Specific screen size widths at which your site’s content will change to provide the user with the best possible layout to consume the information.

External Link: Linking to an external page outside of the website. When linking to an external webpage, links should open up a new window or tab. All external links should be absolute URLs.

Freeze: When a site is “frozen”, no edits can be made to the site.

Front end (HTML, CSS): The part of a website that a user sees and interacts with. HTML provides the structure and content while CSS provides styling and decoration.

Internal Link: Linking to another page within the same website. Internal links should open up in the same window unless otherwise specified. All internal links should be relative URLs.

Launch: When all assets for an individual school program go live for students and prospects.

Organic Search: Organic search is based on unpaid, natural rankings determined by search engine algorithms, and can be optimized with various SEO practices.

Relative URL: The relative URL is used when linking internally on a website. It does not include the entire URL, only the relative path. Ex: /admissions/events/

Responsive Design: Designing for all browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer, etc.) and screen sizes (mobile, tablet, desktop, etc.) in mind.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO): Refers to the unpaid part of search engine marketing (SEM). Search engines rank sites and display them based upon what they believe to be most relevant to the user. We work closely with the SEO team to adjust and rewrite sites to achieve a higher ranking in these search engines to garner more traffic and visibility. 

Web Accessibility: Designing for all users in mind, including users with disabilities (blindness, deafness, screen readers, etc.)

Web Leads: A prospect that was generated through the organic lead form.

QA: Stands for Quality Assurance. Quality assurance identifies errors and issues in products and services before hitting production. The extent to what is asked from the QA team often depends on what is being released (initial deployment vs. new version) or standard maintenance procedure.

UAT: User Acceptance Testing. This is 

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For a larger list of 2U term, check out 2U Marketing’s Glossary. 

Another helpful resource list of school program acronyms within the glossary mentioned above.

FLEX: Flex refers to the “Flexible Degree Service Bundle” that 2U/edX offers universities. 

MicroBootCamp (MBC): An attempt to capitalize on the market opportunity for shorter, more affordable technical training programs.

Minisite: A prospect generation website that is not directly branded with our program partners. They generally focus on verticals rather than specific programs.

Paid Landing Page (PLP): A page that a potential prospect lands on after clicking on an ad for one of our programs. All PLPs house a form for pre-prospects to fill out if they’d like to request information. PLPs can be various lengths and contain information that is relevant to the target audience. PLPs are constantly tested to determine what messaging and images drive the most conversions.

Program Vertical: Niches or degrees concentrated within one segment of the market. These are more specific than verticals.

School Referral Landing Page (SRLP): Users navigate to SRLPs from a link on the school site, but the SRLP lives on a 2U web property. This audience is considered high intent.

School Side Landing Page (SSLP): SSLPs live on the university partner’s website. There will be a link to our OLPs and/or an Embeddable Lead taxi form on that page for users to convert. 

Umbrella Site: An umbrella site houses multiple programs for one university on one domain.

Vertical: A vertical is any field of study in which 2U operates programs. When interfacing with school partners, we refer to verticals as “academic disciplines.”

Example: The business vertical includes degrees in business, accounting, and business analytics.

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AWS: Stands for Amazon Web Services. This is Amazon’s cloud software services which we run most of our technology on at 2U. There are a lot of products that full under the umbrella of AWS, such as Red Shift, EC2, RDS, SES, S3, etc.

Jira: Our 2U project management system. 

Optimizely: Our conversion rate optimization testing platform. Optimizely splits traffic between a control (the current version of a webpage) and variations, measuring the difference in conversion that occurs by changing elements on our websites.

Vibram: Used by designers and web producers to add in assets specific to each program (color theme, logos, fonts, etc.) Our degree and minisite WordPress environments pull in a program’s unique assets from Vibram, which determines the ‘look’ of the site. Previously known as whitelabel.

Taxi: Taxi is used to create lead forms, which are featured across program sites for prospective students to fill out a form to show their interest and find out more information about a program.

Embeddable Lead Form (ELF):

WordPress: 2U’s content management system (CMS). All edits to degree websites are done in WordPress. 

Block: A component with specific functionalities that allows users to easily add content to a page.

Examples: Section, Card, Text Media, Heading, Column, Table etc.

Dev (Developer) Environment: This environment is where our developers (Big Bite) implement updates and fixes for upcoming releases to improve our live sites. Ex: https://datascience.vip-develop.twoyou.co 

Fluid Width Pages: Fluid width pages span fully from left to right without any margins. Most homepages and OLPs are fluid width pages.

OLP: Stands for Organic Landing Page. A landing page on any website (program sites, minisites, or 2u.com) that’s purpose is to rank for a targeted keyword.

Production Site / Live Site: The site which a user will see/visit to apply or gather information about a program. Ex: https://datascience.vip-uat.twoyou.co/ 

Sidebar Pages: These pages are similar to full width pages with the only differentiation being a sidebar navigation widget taking up a portion of the page’s width. Most interior pages are sidebar pages.

UAT (User Acceptance Testing) Environment: This environment takes a snapshot of our live site and allows us to view how the changes made in the dev environment will affect our live sites.  Ex. SMU’s Data Science UAT

Contentful: EdX’s content management system (CMS).

Compose: Compose is an app within Contentful, which takes a page-centric approach to content creation and editing on edX.

Discovery Service Administration (aka Django Admin, aka Discovery, aka Disco): Leveraged for back-end catalog work (e.g., UUIDs, slugs/URLs, Indexed Text).

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CTA (Call to Action): A call to action (CTA) is a statement designed to get an immediate response from the person reading or hearing it. It’s used in business as part of a marketing strategy to get your target market to respond through action.

Footer: An area located at the bottom of every page on a website, below the main body content. It can include branding, navigation, and more information about the site.

Hero: A term used to describe an oversized banner image at the top of a website featuring the H1 and optional form and additional text. It serves as a user’s first glimpse of your company and offering because of its prominent above the fold placement towards the top of a webpage that extends full-width.

Header: A main bar that sits towards the top of your website. Its purpose is to introduce your branding, provide navigation, and relay information to the user. Headers usually appear on every single page of your website, though they can be removed on pages like our paid landing pages

Lead Form (aka Taxi Form): Built out in our Taxi CMS, our forms are meant for capturing prospective student leads, emails, and other information.

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For more information on who to reach out to for each team, visit our handbook documentation

Compliance: Refers to our marketing compliance team, who we work with regularly. The compliance team makes sure we legally follow our contractual obligations under our University Partner agreements, comply with all external federal, state and local laws and regulations, and protect our university partners’ brands. 

CRO: Stands for Conversion Rate Optimization. Marketing strategy team that aims to improve the percentage of visitors who complete a lead form (and ultimately, the number of qualified students who enroll in our programs) through the proposal and testing of website changes.

ODG & SEO: Stands for Organic Demand Generation and Search Engine Optimization. The goal of this team is to increase search engine rankings, increase visibility, traffic, and applicants to our programs.

Marketing Tech: The Marketing Tech (aka MarTech or MKTGTECH) team is responsible for the back end integration and continuous updating of WordPress. We work closely with this team to ask for enhancements or fixes to the WordPress tool. Marketing Tech works with an outside company called Big Byte to code these enhancements.

Marketing Operations & New Partner Implementation: Develop, execute, and oversee a data-driven marketing strategy in collaboration with other teams to drive enrollment growth for each program, including prospect acquisition and funnel conversion. Engage with key internal marketing stakeholders to ensure all digital web properties and acquisition objectives in both paid and organic channels are continually being met.

CMG (Creative Marketing Group): The 2U Creative Marketing Group consists of a staff of designers, writers, multimedia specialists, and production artists who are responsible for creating and overseeing all of the marketing collateral and blog content for 2U programs. We also assist with creating materials for different departments within 2U.

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