Designing a website

What is a website design?

Website design process Web design is the design or designing of a Web page, Website or Web application. The term generally refers to the graphical side of Web development using images, CSS and XHTML.

When the Internet was first invented, Web design consisted of a basic markup language that included some formatting options, and the unique ability to link pages together using hyperlinks. It was this feature that characterized the Web among other communication methods, and characterized Web design among other design methods. Because of this unique behaviour of the World Wide Web, and the unique behaviour it encouraged in users, Web design would prove to be unlike any other form of design before or since, with the possible exception of interactive CD-ROM design.

As the Web and Web design progressed, the markup language used to make it, known as HTML, became more complex and flexible. Things like tables, which could be used to display tabular information, were soon subverted for use as invisible layout devices. With the advent of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), table based layout is increasingly regarded as outdated. Database integration technologies such as server-side scripting (see PHP, ASP.NET, ASP, JSP, and ColdFusion) and design standards like CSS further changed and enhanced the way the Web was made.

The introduction of Macromedia Flash into an already interactivity-ready scene has further changed the face of the Web, giving new power to designers and media creators, and offering new interactivity features to users.

Liquid versus fixed layouts

Programmers were the original web page designers in the early 1990s. Currently most web designers come from a graphic artist background in print, where the artist has absolute control over the size and dimensions of all aspects of the design. On the web however, the Web designer has no control over several factors, especially the width of the browser window.

Many designers compensate for this by wrapping their entire webpage in a fixed width box, essentially limiting it to an exact pixel-perfect value, which is a fixed layout. Some create the illusion of liquidity by building the graphics for their webpage at a size larger than any current standard monitor size (however, at the current rate of monitor supersizing, this method will soon become obsolete). Other designers say that this is bad because it ignores the preferences of the user, who might have their browser sized a specific way that they like best. These people propose a liquid layout, where the size of the Web page adjusts itself based on the size of the browser window.

There is a usability reason (rather than wanting control) for why a designer may choose a more fixed layout. Studies have shown that there is usually an optimal line width in terms of readability. One rule to appear from such studies is that lines should be between 40-60 characters long, or approximately 11 words per line.

This decision of which style of layout to use is often made on a case by case basis, depending on the needs and audience of the website.

Interesting note: Giga Design Online is a fixed layout.

Flash

Macromedia Flash is a robust graphics animation program used to create and deliver dynamic content and interactive applications to the web.

Many graphic artists use Flash because it gives them exact control over every part of the design, and anything can be animated and generally "jazzed up." Some application designers enjoy flash because it lets them create applications that don't have to be refreshed or go to a new web page every time an action occurs. There are many sites which forego HTML entirely for Flash.

Flash detractors claim that Flash websites tend to be poorly designed, and often use confusing and non-standard user-interfaces. Up until recently, search engines have been unable to index Flash pages, which has prevented stores from having their products easily found. Also Flash websites cannot take into account many usability features, such as respecting the browser's font size and allowing deep-linking, and they outright fail any accessibility tests for blind users using screen readers. Although Macromedia has addressed these long-standing problems in the latest incarnation of Flash, it has yet to be seen whether it will lure over stalwart designers.

The final consensus is that Flash is simply a tool, and like all tools it takes a skillful craftsperson to know when, and how, to use it properly. Macromedia's other two products, Fireworks and Dreamweaver, makes Flash integration with graphics and HTML a lot easier.

CSS versus tables

Back when Netscape Navigator 4 dominated the browser market, the popular (but now deprecated) solution available for designers to lay out a Web page was by using tables. Often even simple designs for a page would require dozens of tables nested in each other. Many web templates in Dreamweaver still use this technique today. Navigator 4 didn't support CSS to a useful degree, so it simply wasn't used.

After the browser wars were over, and Internet Explorer dominated the market, designers started turning towards CSS as an alternate, better means of laying out their pages. CSS proponents say that tables should only be used for tabular data, not for layout. Using CSS instead of tables also returns HTML to a semantic markup, which helps bots and search engines understand what's going on in a web page. Today, all modern Web browsers now support CSS with different degrees of limitations.

However, one of the main points against CSS is that by relying on it exclusively, control is essentially relinquished as each browser has its own quirks which result in a slightly different page display. This is especially a problem as not every browser supports the same subset of CSS codes. For some designers used to the creating table-based layouts, developing Web sites in CSS often becomes a matter of replicating what can be done with tables, leading some to find CSS design rather cumbersome. For example, it has proved rather difficult to produce certain design elements, such as vertical positioning, and full-length footers in a design using absolute positions.

These days most modern browsers have solved most of these quirks in CSS rendering and this has made many different CSS layouts possible. However, people still continue to use old browsers which do not get updated any more. Most notable among these are Internet Explorer 5 and 5.5 which, according to some web designers, are becoming the new Netscape Navigator 4 — a block that holds the internet back from converting to CSS design.

Dynamic web design

Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), the traditional tool of web design, was designed to tell a browser how to render text from a server in a browser. Despite its usefulness for structuring text, it does not provide dynamic features that allows data reuse, modularity, and server-side scripting. HTML can provide some structure but in order to produce style, which is absolutely essential to good web design, the HTML becomes cumbersome, unorganized, and does not lend itself to the standardization of like-elements. Commercial page makers usually generate code in this manner. However, large numbers of HTML files become nearly impossible to individually edit, save, upload and verify. By using the technologies of PHP, XSLT, XML, and CSS, a site will produce the same output but will be easier to maintain, modular in design and built on reusable data. The follow is an example of such implementation:

CSS can be used to define how various elements in the HTML will look. The class attributes can be easily updated and provide a much better set of tools for designing a pages appearance.
PHP is designed to provide more modularity (e.g., menus, titles, footers, etc.) by allowing just one file to be edited to control a module that appears on many pages. The source code remains the same, but it can be edited in mass because PHP executes all of the functions on the server.
XML can be used to constantly update a site that must change its layout to dynamically generate pages based on input data. By ordering XML tags in a hierarchical fashion, a pseudo-database for your data can be created in an XML document. XML is also reusable, which keeps the coder from having to re-write data.
XSLT can then be used to render this generated XML properly and to make sure it is easily modifiable.

When these steps are accomplished, a comment added to a site is stored in XML via a PHP script with the XSLT ensuring proper formatting. This provides a simple, yet dynamic site that re-builds itself each time it is requested by a client.