Web Design: Tools and Technologies of the Modern World

Web design is a form of terminology which covers different skills and disciplines used for the maintenance of websites. It includes various types of designs such as web graphic, interface design, authoring, user experience design and search engine optimisations. It basically describes the design processes used for designing a website include the writing mark-ups. Web designers often work in teams covering different aspects of the design process, albeit few designers themselves cover all of them.

History of Web Designing

Web designing has a fairly very recent history back in the 1990s. Seeing web designing as a technological standpoint in the modern era, it has become part of people’s everyday life. The user interface of the modern day internet systems have changed because of the web designing through the use of animated graphics, different typography styles and background music.

Evolution of the Web Design

The HTML mark-up was the first to be used for displaying tabular data. It was launched by Microsoft in the year of 1996, with its own features and tags which also supported the style sheets for recording data. Later on the designers found the HTML tables created a lot of complex and multi column layouts, so something better had to be invented. CSS was also introduced in the same year by W3C to support the presentations and layouts; which allowed the HTML code to be semantic and improved the web accessibility.

The modern browsers and New Standards

The Netscape communicator code released by the Netscape in the 1998 was under an open source code license, which helped designers to improve the quality of the software. But similarly the internet explorer was launched in the year 2000 which was the first browser that supported HTML 4.01 and CSS1. This led to the end of the browsers war in which Netscape lost officially to Microsoft.

From then many new browsers have also come to scene, out of which many are also open sources for faster developments in support of new standards. The W3C also released HTML5 and the CSS3 along with the new JavaScript API. The HTML5 is also referred to as the entire suite of new standards (HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript).

Techniques and Skills

Typography in websites is must for making it a successful one. And preferably a website should use without serif or serif interfaces, and not a combination of two. Most browsers recognise a specific no. of safe fonts, and mainly use it in order to avoid complications. A new feature known as the font downloading was introduced in the Safar 3.1, Opera10 and Mozilla Firefox 3.5 which is included in the CSS3 font module. Page layouts are another aspect which should remain consistent on different pages.

This measure is to be taken while the page is being constructed as the page width is vital for aligning objects and page layouts. Fluid layouts were the substitution for the HTML-table- base layouts, as the grid based design and the coding technique were rejected. Responsive Web design is a new approach, based on the CSS3 where a deeper level per device specification within the page’s style sheet, through the enhanced sheet of the use of CSS.

 

Visual and User experience Design

Visual designing is a very important aspect of the Web Design. The designers should have a vivid knowledge of the website to be constructed and what the quality of the code should be. The ownership and business design should also be taken to account making it easier to navigate, and can find the desired information or products. User experience designs on the other hand deals with the layouts, clear instructions and labelling the websites. So users with less experience are less likely to see the advantages and usefulness of the design. Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;}