Web design

Web design is a kind of graphic design intended for the development and styling of objects of the Internet's information environment to provide them with high-end consumer features and aesthetic qualities.

Web design is the skill of creating presentations of content (usually hypertext or hypermedia) that are delivered to an end-user through the World Wide Web, using a Web browser or other Web-enabled software . The intent of web design is to create a website-a collection of electronic documents and applications that reside on a Web server/servers. The website may include text, images, sounds and other content, and may be interactive.

This definition separates Web design from web programming, emphasizing the functional features of a web site, as well as positioning web design as a kind of graphic design. The process of designing web pages, web sites, web applications or multimedia for the Web may utilize multiple disciplines, such as animation, authoring, communication design, corporate identity, graphic design, human-computer interaction, information architecture, interaction design, marketing, photography, search engine optimization and typography.

Such elements as text, bit-mapped images (GIFs, JPEGs) and forms can be placed on the page using HTML/XHTML/XML tags. Displaying more complex media (vector graphics, animations, videos, and sounds) requires plug-ins such as Adobe Flash, QuickTime, Java run-time environment, etc. Plug-ins is also embedded into web page by using HTML/XHTML tags. Improvements in browsers' compliance with W3C standards prompted a widespread acceptance and usage of XHTML/XML in conjunction with Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to position and manipulate web page elements and objects.

Typically Web pages are classified as static or dynamic:

  • Static pages don't change content and layout with every request unless a human (web master/programmer) manually updates the page. A simple HTML page is an example of static content.
  • Dynamic pages adapt their content and/or appearance depending on end-user's input/interaction or changes in the computing environment (user, time, database modifications, etc.) Content can be changed on the client side (end-user's computer) by using client-side scripting languages (JavaScript, JScript, Actionscript, etc.) to alter DOM elements (DHTML). Dynamic content is often compiled on the server utilizing server-side scripting languages (Perl, PHP, ASP, JSP, ColdFusion, etc.). Both approaches are usually used in complex applications.