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Evolution of Web Design

Web design involves creating presentations of content delivered through the world wide web. It covers skills like user interface design, site structure, layout, colors, fonts, and imagery combined with design principles. Web design has evolved from basic HTML sites to incorporate tools like CSS, Flash, and responsive design. Effective web design considers skills like typography, page layout, code quality, visual design, user experience, and uses tools like graphics software, HTML/CSS editors, and testing tools.

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Varun Tyagi
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110 views3 pages

Evolution of Web Design

Web design involves creating presentations of content delivered through the world wide web. It covers skills like user interface design, site structure, layout, colors, fonts, and imagery combined with design principles. Web design has evolved from basic HTML sites to incorporate tools like CSS, Flash, and responsive design. Effective web design considers skills like typography, page layout, code quality, visual design, user experience, and uses tools like graphics software, HTML/CSS editors, and testing tools.

Uploaded by

Varun Tyagi
Copyright
© Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Web Design

Web design is the skill by which we can create presentations of content (usually hypertext or hypermedia) that are delivered to an end-user with the help of world wide web. It covers many different skills and disciplines which are used in the maintenance and production of websites. This includes the information about architecture, user interface, site structure, navigation, layout, colors, fonts, and imagery. All of these are combined with the principles of design to create a website that meets the goals of the owner and designer. Web design is a smartest and interactive way to display your information to your visitors While design is the art and process of combining individual elements of design (lines, shape, texture, color) into a pleasing arrangment, Web Design is the art and process of creating a single Web page or entire Web sites and may involve both the aesthetics and the mechanics of a Web site's operation although primarily it focuses on the look and feel of the Web site - the design elements. Some of the aspects that may be included in Web design or Web production are graphics and animation creation, color selection, font selection, navigation design, content creation, HTML/XML authoring, JavaScript programming, and ecommerce development. Web design is a form of electronic publishing.

Evolution of web design


Microsoft released its first competitive browser in 1996, which was complete with its own features, tags and the first browser to support style sheets, which at the time was seen as an obscure authoring technique. The HTML markups for tables was originally intended for displaying tabular data. However designers quickly realized the potential of using HTML tables for creating the complex, multicolumn layouts that were otherwise not possible. At this time, as design and good aesthetics seemed to take precedence over good mark-up structure, and little attention was paid to semantics and web accessibility. HTML sites were limited in their design options, even more so with earlier versions of HTML. Many web designers had to use complicated table structures or even use blank spacer to create complex design .GIF images to stop empty table cells from collapsing. In December 1996 CSS was introduced by the W3C to support presentation and layout; this allowed HTML code to be semantic rather than both semantic and presentational, and improved web accessibility, see tableless web design. In 1996 Flash (originally known as FutureSplash) was developed. At the time it was of a very simple layout basic tools and a timeline but it enabled web designers to go beyond the point of HTML at the time. It has now progressed to be very powerful, enabling it to develop entire sites.

Skills and Techniques


Typography
Usually a successful website has only a few typefaces which are of a similar style, instead of using a range of typefaces. Preferably a website should use sans serif or serif typefaces, not a combination of the two. Typography in websites should also be careful the amount of typefaces used, good design will incorporate a few similar typefaces rather than a range of type faces. Most browsers recognize a specific number of safe fonts, which designers mainly use in order to avoid complications.

Page layout
Web pages should be well laid out to improve navigation for the user. Also the sites page layout should also remain consistent on different pages for navigation purposes. While constructing the sites, it's important to consider page width as this is vital for aligning objects and in layout design. The most popular websites generally have a width close to 1024 pixels. Most pages are also centre aligned, to make objects look more aesthetically pleasing on larger screens. For replacement of HTML-table-base layouts Fluid layout was developed around 2000, as a rejection of grid-based design both as a page layout design principle, and as a coding technique, but were very slow to be adopted. The axiomatic assumption is that readers will have screen devices, or windows thereon, of different sizes and that there is nothing the page designer can do to change this. Accordingly, a design should be broken down into units (sidebars, content blocks, advert areas, navigation areas) that are sent to the browser and which will be fitted into the display window by the browser, as best it can. As the browser does know the details of the reader's screen (window size, font size relative to window etc.) the browser does a better job of this than a presumptive designer. Although such a display may often change the relative position of major content units, sidebars may be displaced below body text rather than to the side of it, this is usually a better and particularly a more usable display than a compromise attempt to display a hard-coded grid that simply doesn't fit the device window. In particular, the relative position of content blocks may change, but each block is less affected. Better usability, particularly by the avoidance of horizontal scrolling.

Quality of code
When creating a site it is good practice to conform to standards. This is usually done via a description specifying what the element is doing. Not conforming to standards may not make a website unusable or error prone, standards can relate to the correct layout of pages for readability as well making sure coded elements are closed appropriately. This includes errors in code, better layout for code as well as making sure your IDs and classes are identified properly. Poorly-coded pages are sometimes called as tag soup. Validating via W3C can only be done when a correct DOCTYPE declaration is made, which is used to highlight errors in code. The system identifies the errors and areas that do not conform to web design standards. This information can then be corrected by the user.

Visiual design
Good visual design on a website identifies and works for its target market. This can be an age group or particular strand of culture thus the designer should understand the trends of its audience. Designers should also understand the type of website they are designing, meaning a business website should not be designed the same as a social media site for example. Designers should also understand the owner or business the site is representing, to make sure they are portrayed favourably. The aesthetics or overall design of a site should not clash with the content, making it easier for the user to navigate and can find the desired information or products etc

User experience design


For a user to understand a website they must be able to understand how the website works. This affects their experience. The experience of user is related to layout, clear instructions and labelling on a website. The user must understand how they can interact on a site. In relation to continued use, a user must perceive the usefulness of that website if they are to continue using it. With users who are skilled and well versed with website use, this influence relates directly to how they perceive websites, which encourages further use. Therefore users with less experience are less likely to see the advantages or usefulness of websites. This in turn should focus, on design for a more universal use and ease of access to accommodate as many users as possible regardless of user skill

Tools and technologies


Web designers use a variety of different tools depending on what part of the production process they are involved in. These tools are updated over time by newer standards and software but the principles behind them remain the same. Web graphic designers use vector and raster graphics packages for creating web formatted imagery or design prototypes. Technologies which are used for creating websites include standardised mark up which could be hand coded. SEO tools may be used to check search engine ranking and suggest improvements. Other tools web designers might use include mark up validators and other testing tools for usability and accessibility to ensure their web sites meet web accessibility guidelines.

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