Integrated Intelligent Research (IIR) International Journal of Web Technology

Volume: 01 Issue: 01 June 2012 Page No.12-14

ISSN: 2278-2389

Basics of Website Design

G.Sreedhar
Assistant Professor,Department of Computer Science
Rashtriya Sanskrit Vidyapeetha, (Deemed University),Tirupati

Abstract- In the last few years, web applications have accomplished by combining a clear understanding of what
experienced a rapid and drastic development in terms of scale, contributes to an effective online presence aligned with very best
complexity and underlying technologies. A Web site is a in design methodology and technical functionality. Web
collection of Web pages containing text, images, audio and applications are typically software programs that operate on the
videos. The complete structure of the Internet is made up of Web internet, interacting with the user through an internet browser.
sites, a mode of sharing information on the Internet.: These are increasingly popular in the IT industry. Web
applications possess different unique characteristics that make
Keywords: website, web server, web browser, web content web testing and quality assurance of the applications more
complex. The following aspects characterize web applications.
I. INTRODUCTION a. Massive access of users: Web applications provide cross-
platform universal access to web resources for the massive
Over the last few years there has been a remarkable increase in user population.
use of the World Wide Web (WWW) for a wide and variety of b. The difficulty of establishing the causes for the errors:
purposes. There was also a fast growth in its applications. This Since web applications may be accessed by millions of
led the Internet users to realize the importance and the benefits users, errors have a big impact. Finding the origin of errors
gained from a globally interconnected hypermedia system. On in web applications may be difficult and its recovery time
the other hand it causes a larger number of useless, meaningless may not be immediate, given the great number of software
and badly designed websites on the Internet world causing elements that intervene.
unwanted additional traffic; this is all because of an unorganized
non-planned websites development processes. In present days the c. The integration of diverse software elements for an
internet has quietly become the body of business world with web application in internet: Web users employ different
applications as the brains. The important quality attributes for hardware equipment, network connections, operating
web applications include reliability, availability, interoperability systems, middleware and web server support. In a web
and security. Therefore methodologies for analyzing, application, two main components are always required: the
constructing, understanding, testing and maintaining web backend and front-end. The backend is the software required
applications will be essential to the IT industry. for an application in internet to operate. The most important
software in the backend are: the database servers (MySQL,
II. FEATURES OF WEB APPLICATIONS Oracle, Informix, DB2), web servers (Apache, Netscape
Enterprise Server, etc.,) and the interface programming
In the last few years, web applications have experienced a rapid language (HTML, XML, PHP, Servlets, Java, etc.,). The
and drastic development in terms of scale, complexity and front-end is the software required on the part of the client to
underlying technologies. The main features of web applications allow the systems to access the web.
are:
d. Diversity of frameworks to develop, to operate and to
 Platform independence
maintain a web site: The development of web site requires
 On the fly and on the need deployment
a great team of people with different profiles and
backgrounds. These teams include programmers, graphic
designers, usability engineers and specialists in information
integration, network experts and database administrators.
 Multiple entries and loose structure This diversity of personnel profiles makes reliable web
 Event-driven client and procedural server applications development difficult and sometimes
 Lifelong post-development unpredictable.
The exponential growth of WWW applications with all their Because of the above characteristics web based systems tend to
multimedia aspects such as the combination of text, hypertext, evolve rapidly and undergo frequent modifications, due to new
images, computer animations, video, sound, etc., have raised the technological and commercial opportunities. In consequence web
necessity for formal or semiformal methodologies for developing based systems are very sensitive to errors. Most works on web
such applications. As a website is a communication media in applications have been on making them more powerful, but
WWW, first impressions do count, so it must be a compelling relatively little has been done to ensure its quality.
and effective online application. This goal could be

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Integrated Intelligent Research (IIR) International Journal of Web Technology
Volume: 01 Issue: 01 June 2012 Page No.12-14
ISSN: 2278-2389
III. WEB COMPONENTS OF WEB DESIGN include java applets, java servlets, Active X Controls, JavaScript,
VBScript, CGI, ASP, CSS and third party plug-ins.
A Web site is a collection of Web pages containing text, images,
audio and videos. The complete structure of the Internet is made Programming Language: Differences in web programming
up of Web sites, a mode of sharing information on the Internet. language versions or specifications can cause serious problems
Web sites are designed and developed for a wide variety of on both client and server side. For example, when HTML is
organizations in areas such as education, business, research and generated dynamically it is important to know how it is
e-commerce. generated. When development is done in a distributed
In order to use any methodology for quality assessment, it has to environment where developers, for instance, are geographically
present a complete and structured list of possible areas of separated, this area becomes increasingly important. Make sure
complete web site. Based on interviews and different authors’ that specifications are well spread throughout the development
opinions, a quality assessment must cover all components of web organization to avoid future problems.
site. The complete list for quality assessment is as follows.
 Links Databases: Databases play an important role in web application
 Forms technology, housing the content that the web application
 Cookies manages, running queries and fulfilling user requests for data
 Web Indexing storage. The most commonly used type of databases in web
 Dynamic Interface Components applications is the relational database and its managed by SQL
 Programming Language to write, retrieve and editing of information.
 Database
Navigation: Navigation describes the way users navigate within
 Navigation
a page, between different user interface controls (buttons, boxes,
 Graphics
lists, windows, etc.,) or between pages via links.
 Contents
 Platform Graphics: The graphics of web site include images, animations,
 Browsers borders, colors, movie clips, fonts, backgrounds, buttons etc.
 Settings and Preferences Content: Content should be correct, accurate and relevant to the
 Connection Speed information presented in the website.

Links: Links are the main feature on web sites. They constitute Platform (OS): There are several different operating systems
the mean of transport between pages and guide the user to certain that are being used on the market today, and depending on the
addresses without the user knowing the actual address itself. configuration of the user system, compatibility issues may occur.
Different applications may work fine under certain operating
Forms: Forms are used to submit information from the user to systems.
the host, which in turn gets processed and acted upon in some
way. Forms can used both on client side and server side and they Browsers: The browser is the most central component on the
can be designed using scripting languages such as JavaScript, client side of the web. Browsers come in different brands and
VBScript, Perl, etc., versions and have different support for Java, JavaScript,
ActiveX, plugins or different HTML specifications.
Cookies: Cookies are used often used to store information about
the user and his actions on particular site. When a user accesses a Settings and Preferences: Depending on settings and
site that uses cookies, the web server sends information about the preferences of the client machine, web applications may be have
user and stores it on the client computer in form of a cookie. differently. These settings include screen resolution, color depth,
These can be used to create more dynamic and custom made etc.,
pages.
Connection Speed: Users may differ greatly in connection
Web Indexing: There are number of different techniques and speed. Users expect minimum download time of the website.
algorithms used by different search engines to search the internet.
Depending on how the site is designed using Meta tags, frames,
HTML syntax, dynamically created pages, passwords or different IV. ARCHITECTURE OF WEBSITE
languages, the site will be searchable in different ways.
A Web site is the collection of web pages organized on a Web
Dynamic Interface Components: Web pages are not just server. Web pages are of two types, static and dynamic. Static
presented in static HTML any more. Demands for more dynamic Web pages are static in nature and requires no change in the
features, custom made sites and high interactivity have made the content. Dynamic Web pages are dynamic in nature and their
internet a more vivid place than before. Dynamic interface content is changing frequently. Dynamic Web pages use database
components reside and operate both on server and client side of for storing end-user information, product information, transaction
the web, depending on the application. The most important data and content. Static Web pages are designed using Hypertext
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Integrated Intelligent Research (IIR) International Journal of Web Technology
Volume: 01 Issue: 01 June 2012 Page No.12-14
ISSN: 2278-2389
Markup Language (HTML) files. Dynamic Web pages are Fig 1.3: Detailed Architecture of Website
designed using Dynamic HTML, Scripting Languages and other
Web Programming techniques. The organization of web
application can be divided into three major tiers according to the V. CONCLUSION
placement of components. They are
 Web Browser tier The main theme of this paper to view the all components of
 Web Server tier website that ultimately provides the platform for the effective
website design. It is a very primitive paper and also very much
 Database Server tier
required for those people who want to do any research in web
mining, web engineering and other applications of web
Web Browser Tier: A Web browser is a software application
engineering.
that is used to search, view and navigate Web pages hosted by
Web Server over the Internet. The end user requests a Web page
by entering a URL in the address bar of the Web browser. The
Web browser in turn sends the request to the Web server, which
sends an HTML page back to Web browser. The end user then
views the returned page. The Web browser acts as the client in
the client/server architecture of Web server technology. Some of
the popular Web browsers are Internet Explorer, Netscape
Navigator and Mozilla.

Web Server Tier: A Web server acts as a gateway between

client and DBMS residing on the server. It is an application that
serves Web pages over the Internet using the HTTP protocol.
The HTTP is a Hypertext Transfer Protocol used by the WWW
to establish client and server interactions. Web servers publish
Web sites, maintain network traffic and manage user data. Web
servers also help in incorporating the network hierarchy in a Web
site. Some of the Web servers are Apache Web Server, Microsoft
Internet Information Server (IIS) and Web star.

Database Server Tier: Database access interfaces such as

ODBC and JDBC are used to connect web applications with
database servers. The communication between web application
components may also flow through plain TCP sockets, Java RMI
or CORBA. A simple architecture of Web application is shown
in the following figure 1.

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