An Introduction to web design
Web design includes many different skills and corrections in the production and maintenance of websites. There are various web design areas includes,
- Web graphic design;
- Interface design;
- Consistent code and proprietary software;
- User experience design;
- Search engine optimization.
Often many persons will work in teams casing different aspects of the design process, although some designers will cover them all. The word web design is normally used to describe the design process relating to the front-end (client side) design of a website as well as writing mark up. Web design partially overlaps web engineering in the broader scope of web development. Web designers are likely to have an awareness of usability and if their role contains creating profit margin, then they are also expected to be up to date with web accessibility guidelines.
End of the first browser wars
For the period of 1998 Netscape released Netscape Communicator code under an open source license, allowing thousands of developers to contribute in improving the software. However, they decided to start from the beginning, which guided the development of the open source browser and rapidly expanded to a complete application platform. The Web Standards Project was designed and promoted browser agreement with HTML and CSS standards by creating Acid1, Acid2, and Acid3 tests. 2000 was an enormous special year for Microsoft. Internet Explorer was released for Mac; this was important as it was the first browser that completely supported HTML 4.01 and CSS 1, raising the bar in terms of standards submission. Netscape is the first browser to fully support the PNG image format. During this period Netscape was retailed to AOL and this was seen as Netscape’s official loss to Microsoft in the browser wars.
During 21st century the web has become more essential part of people’s lives. As this has happened the technology of the web also goes forward. There have also been substantial changes in the way people use and access the web, and this has changed how sites are designed.
Meanwhile the end of the browser wars, there have been many new browsers coming onto the scene. They tend to have faster development and are more supportive of new standards and many of these are open sourced. The new options are measured by many to be better than Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.
The W3C has introduced new standards for
- HTML (HTML5),
- CSS (CSS3),
Tools and technologies
Web designers use a various entities of tools depending on which part of the production method they are involved. These tools are updated over time by newer standards and software but the principles after they remain the same. Web graphic designers use flight path and raster graphics sets to create web-formatted imagery or design samples. Technologies used to create websites include consistent mark-up, which can be hand-coded or made by WYSIWYG editing software. There is also exclusive software based on plug-ins that bypasses the client’s browser descriptions. These are often WYSIWYG but with the option of using the software’s scripting linguistics. Search engine optimization tools useful to check search engine ranking and put forward developments.
Markup validators and other testing tools for usability and accessibility to make sure their web sites meet web accessibility guidelines by tool web designers.