He didn’t walk in saying his last web designer wouldn’t explain things. That’s not how these conversations go. What he said — the way he framed it before we even got started — was closer to this: no one will explain anything because I’m not going to get it.
That’s a different problem. That’s not a frustration with one web design company that used jargon to explain things, it’s an industry that looks to confuse rather than clarify. That’s a conclusion a person reaches after enough conversations where the words kept coming and nothing landed. Where they nodded along, walked away with a printout, and quietly accepted that this particular world — websites, servers, code — just wasn’t going to make sense to them. Not because they weren’t smart enough to understand it. Because no one had ever tried to explain it.
We work with a fine dining restaurant in Pennsylvania. The owner is a straight shooter, really likable guy — knows his business inside and out, knows his customers, knows food. Never really got tech. That’s not his thing. Every time he talked to his previous account manager at the old web design company, it never landed. He could never get it. And so he stopped trying. He accepted a version of his website that he couldn’t fully describe, couldn’t explain to his staff, and couldn’t update without making three phone calls and hoping something changed.
Now he can ask something and know that he’s going to get a straight answer and know that the work’s going to get done. That’s really the key for him. Not the design. Not the features. The knowing.
That shift — from resignation to clarity — is what plain-English communication produces. And it’s at the center of what the whole relationship with a web design team should be built on.
Why My Web Designer Won’t Explain Things — and What It’s Really About
The web design industry is not, on the whole, full of malicious people who enjoy watching clients feel lost. Most of the confusion isn’t intentional — it’s habitual. Designers and developers spend years inside a world with its own vocabulary, its own shorthand, its own assumptions about what a person already knows. After a while, that vocabulary feels normal. It stops registering as jargon. It just sounds like how you talk about work.
But there’s a layer beneath the habit. And the honest answer to why my web designer won’t explain things — the structural answer — is this: if you don’t understand what you’re paying for and you’re willing to pay, then they know that they can charge you for anything and name it anything.
That’s not a conspiracy theory. It’s just how opacity works in a service industry. When a proposal is written in language that requires a glossary to parse, the client can’t evaluate whether the line items are fair. When a monthly invoice shows up with terms like “CDN optimization” or “server-side rendering improvements,” the business owner paying it has two options: ask a question and feel ignorant, or pay it and move on. Most choose the second. Most companies count on that.
Transparency is powerful precisely because it removes that ambiguity. People can do the math. They can look at a bill and say: I’m getting X, Y, and Z for this number — okay, this makes sense. Or they can ask a question and get an answer that answers it. That’s the whole thing. It’s not complicated. It’s just rare.
What Jargon Does to a Client
There’s a specific kind of damage that happens when someone gets talked past in enough conversations. It stops being about any one company. It becomes their expectation of every company. They come into the next conversation already certain that it won’t land, already braced for the performance of expertise that leaves them no more informed than when they started.
They’re not wrong to expect that. They’ve earned that expectation. And it’s one of the more frustrating things to inherit from an industry that treats clarity as a liability.
Here’s what jargon does functionally: it creates distance between the client and the thing they’re paying for. That distance becomes dependency. If you can’t understand what your website is built on, you can’t make decisions about it. You can’t evaluate a competitor’s pitch. You can’t recognize when something is being explained poorly versus when you’re being charged for something unnecessary. You need the company to translate everything, which means you need the company for everything, which means they can set the terms of every conversation from then on.
Plain language does the opposite, it collapses the distance which is what our web design new client welcome email tries to do. Explain things clearly so there’s no confusion. Clients come from all kinds of backgrounds and understandings. For example, a client who understands what hosting is — and what their domain is — can have a real conversation about whether their current setup makes sense. They can ask the question they have instead of the question they think they’re allowed to ask. The relationship changes when both sides are in possession of the same information.
Economist George Akerlof described this exact dynamic in his Nobel Prize-winning research on what happens when one side of a transaction knows more than the other — and the other side has no way to evaluate what they’re getting:
“An asymmetry in available information has developed: for the sellers now have more knowledge about the quality of a car than the buyers. But good cars and bad cars must still sell at the same price — since it is impossible for a buyer to tell the difference between a good car and a bad car.”
— George A. Akerlof, “The Market for ‘Lemons’: Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism,” The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 1970. Source: The Quarterly Journal of Economics
How We Explain Something Technical
Let’s use hosting, because it comes up constantly and almost nobody gets a straight explanation of what it is.
The instinct is to say something like: your website files live on a server, and your domain points to that server, and when someone types in your URL, the server sends the code to their browser and they see the site. That’s not wrong. But it also doesn’t land for someone who has never thought about what a server is or what “sending code” means in practice.
A good analogy turns something technical into something concrete. So instead of the technical description, try this: picture a residential neighborhood. The plot of land is the server — it’s the physical space where your website lives. The house built on that land is the code you see, the website itself. And the address — the street number — is your domain, the www.yourbusiness.com that gets typed into a browser. When someone visits your site, they’re putting your address into a GPS, driving to that plot of land, and seeing the house that’s built there.
Now the client understands three things at once: what hosting is, what a domain is, and what their website is. Not abstractly — concretely. They can visualize it.
The key detail in that analogy isn’t the land or the address. It’s the house — the code you see. Most people never get that part explained. They’re told what hosting costs and what a domain costs, but nobody tells them that the website they’re looking at is the built structure on top of all of it. That’s the piece that makes everything else click.
And this is important: you don’t need to be throwing analogies at everyone all the time, that’s annoying. If the first plain-English version lands — if someone hears “that’s where your website files live” and nods in a way that means they understand it — you’re done. You go to the analogy when the first explanation doesn’t stick. Not before. The point isn’t to perform clarity. The point is to produce it.
If you’re paying for something, we think that you should understand what it is you’re paying for. That’s not a radical position. It’s just what respect looks like.
The Line Between Plain English and Dumbing Down
There’s a phrase that gets used to dismiss this kind of communication, and it’s worth addressing directly. “Dumbing it down.” Said with just enough contempt to make the speaker feel superior and the listener feel ashamed for needing the explanation. But sometimes simple is better, like our simple web design invoice.
You can call it dumbing down if you’re a rude person. But that framing gets it exactly backwards.
The ability to explain something complex in plain language isn’t a shortcut — it’s evidence of mastery and the lack of mastery is why web designers avoid some answers. There’s a reason the phrase “if you can’t explain it to a third grader, you don’t understand it” has held up as long as it has. It’s not about condescending to the other person. It’s a test of whether you understand the thing you’re claiming to know. Someone who learned something last week talks like they learned it last week. Someone who’s been working in a field for twenty years, if they’re any good, talks like anyone could follow them.
You start out learning something talking a lot of technical mumbo jumbo that no one understands. And after decades, you end up speaking in such simple terms that anyone you talk to — even someone completely outside the industry — can fully understand what it is you’re talking about. That’s not the beginning of expertise. That’s the end of it.
“Dumbing down” is a derogatory term usually used by people that can’t even do that. People who haven’t gotten far enough into something to understand it well enough to explain it simply. People who confuse complexity of explanation with depth of knowledge. They’re not the same thing. They’re often inversely related.
Simplifying, speaking so that anyone can follow, is an art, and it’s a skill set. It’s also what clients in every industry benefit from and appreciate — not because they can’t handle nuance, but because their business is their wheelhouse and web design is yours. If they were to talk mumbo jumbo to us about their industry — restaurant operations, HVAC systems, estate planning — we would be just as confused as the reverse. That’s not a knock on us. It’s just how specialization works. Everyone deserves the same bridge.
How That Respect Shows Up in Practice
What changed for the Pennsylvania restaurant owner wasn’t that we gave him a glossary. It wasn’t that we walked him through a technical orientation or made him sit through a demo of the WordPress backend. What changed was simpler than that.
He could ask a question and get an answer that answered it. Not a performance of answering. Not a response that contained the right words but left him in exactly the same position of uncertainty. A real answer to the question he asked, in language he could hear and use.
That sounds like a low bar. It isn’t. The web design industry has set expectations so thoroughly in the opposite direction that a plain answer registers as remarkable. Clients come in guarded because they’ve been through enough of the alternative to assume it’s normal.
The reframe is this: clarity isn’t a customer service feature. It isn’t a bonus that some companies offer and others don’t. It’s the baseline condition for a working relationship. If someone can’t understand what they have, what they’re paying for, or what’s happening with their website, they’re not a client — they’re a dependent. That’s a dynamic we don’t want and they don’t benefit from.
The goal every time someone asks us a question — technical or not — is to produce understanding, not demonstrate knowledge. Those are different targets. One of them is for us. The other one is for them. It’s the same reason we built our entire approach around removing the burden of the website from your plate — clarity and ownership go together.
The Industry Incentive Nobody Says Out Loud
Confusion doesn’t usually come from incompetence. It comes from a business model where confusion is useful.
When a client can’t evaluate their bill, they pay their bill. When they can’t understand what’s wrong with their website, they can’t challenge the diagnosis. When they can’t visualize what “server-side migration” involves, they can’t get a second opinion. The jargon wall doesn’t just make clients feel dumb — it makes them financially manageable. A confused client is a client who can’t leave, because they don’t know what they’d be leaving or how to find something better. The same dynamic is behind why so many web companies go silent after the project wraps — keep people confused, keep them dependent.
We’re not the only transparent company in this space. There’s a lot of great web design companies out there that are honest about their pricing and their language. They exist. Give us a shot, but give them a shot too — and when you’re talking to anyone in this industry, pay attention to whether the explanation produces understanding or produces more questions. That’s your signal.
If it’s confusing — if you keep walking away with more questions than you came in with — that’s worth asking about. Ask a trusted advisor to get on a call with you. Ask to have something explained a different way. You’re not being difficult. You’re being a business owner who should understand where their money is going.
What Plain English Looks Like Over Time
The Pennsylvania restaurant client didn’t become a tech person. He didn’t need to. That’s not the point. The point is that he went from someone who had accepted ignorance as the condition of being a small business owner with a website — to someone who could have an actual conversation about it.
When something changed on his site, he knew what changed and why. When we recommended something, he could evaluate whether it made sense. When he asked a question, he got an answer he could hold onto. The relationship shifted from something he tolerated to something that worked — and it’s the same experience we try to build for every small business owner we do website design work with.
That’s what communication philosophy produces at the ground level. Not just good feelings. Not just a warmer tone. An informed client who can make decisions, ask real questions, and hold the people working on their website to a real standard. Which is also, incidentally, the kind of client relationship where the best work gets done.
You can’t build something great for someone who doesn’t understand it well enough to tell you what they need. The plain English is so pure Yeetish, and it isn’t just for them. It’s for the work.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why does my web designer use so much jargon?
Often it’s habit — people who work inside a technical field stop noticing when their vocabulary stops making sense to people outside it. But there’s also a structural reason: a client who can’t understand what they’re paying for is less likely to push back on the bill. Plain English requires confidence in your pricing and your work. Not every company has both.
Is it reasonable for me to ask my web designer to explain things in plain language?
Yes. Fully and without apology. You’re paying for a service that affects your business. Understanding that service — what it costs, what it includes, what’s happening with your site — is not too much to ask. If the explanation consistently produces more confusion than clarity, that’s a red flag worth taking seriously.
What’s the difference between simplifying an explanation and dumbing it down?
Simplifying produces understanding. “Dumbing down” is the phrase people use when they haven’t mastered something well enough to explain it plainly — so they frame simplicity as a compromise rather than a skill. The ability to explain something in plain language without losing accuracy is harder than speaking in technical terms. It’s also more useful to the person on the other end of the conversation.
Does Yeet Websites explain everything — or just the basics?
Everything you want explained, we’ll explain. Some clients want to understand every technical decision behind their site. Others want to know the essentials and trust us to handle the rest — and we’re equally comfortable with both. We don’t push jargon, and we don’t withhold explanations. If you ask a question, you get a real answer. That’s the whole policy.