Web design is the process of planning and creating a website. Text, images, digital media and interactive elements are used by web designers to produce the page seen on the web browser. Web designers utilize markup language, most notably HTML for structure and CSS for presentation as well as JavaScript to add interactivity to develop pages that can be read by web browsers.
As a whole, the process of web design can include conceptualization, planning, producing, post-production, research, advertising. The site itself can be divided up into pages. The site is navigated by using hyperlinks, which are commonly blue and underlined but can be made to look like anything the designer wishes. Images can also be hyperlinks.
Web designing is all about writing code that is valid HTML and CSS which make it easier to correct problems, and edit pages. HTML and CSS are the fundamental technologies for building web pages: (X)HTML for structure, accompanied by CSS for style and layout. By separating the presentation style of documents from the content of documents, CSS simplifies web authoring and site maintenance. For example, having a separate CSS file allows for making aesthetic changes to the entire website rather than just to a single web page. If CSS rules are included within a single HTML page, changes would have to be made to each and every page that used the element in question. The reasoning is that HTML should only be used for raw content and CSS be used to manipulate the content for aesthetic style.
XHTML is HTML 4.01 re-formatted as XML, in the way that HTML was previously based upon SGML. The syntactic rules of XML are less flexible than SGML, which means that XML is simpler to process and validate, although it is more demanding of accuracy for hand-editing. The first XHTML standard was a simple reformulation of the HTML standard (i.e. the same tags were used) and did not make changes other than those directly related to the syntax. Later XHTML standards began to revise the sets of tags in use as well, although these standards were never widely adopted.
XHTML is widely used on the web, although this was not well understood by web designers, and was largely driven by fashion than by technical advances. Further development of the XHTML standard has been abandoned, although the new standard, HTML5, is now available and this also supports an XML serialization.
Changes and updates
Initial website designs normally need small tweaks and changes after they go live, but major updates and re-designs may be undertaken periodically.
CROSS BROWSER
Cross-browser pertains to the ability for a website, web application, HTML conception or client-side script to support all the web browsers. The term cross-browser is frequently mixed up with multi-browser. Multi-browser is a new prototype in web development that allows a website or web application to allow for more functionality over several web browsers, while assuring that the website or web application is available to the largest possible audience without any loss in functioning. Cross-browser capability allows a website or web application to be properly delivered by all browsers. The term cross-browser has existed since the web development commenced.
The term is still in use, but to lesser extent. The main causes for this are:
• Subsequent versions of both Internet Explorer and Netscape included support for HTML 4.0 and CSS1, proprietary extensions were no longer required to accomplish many generally desired designs.
• Moderately more compatible DOM manipulation methods became the preferred process for writing client-side scripts.
• The browser market has diversified, and to claim cross-browser compatibility, the website is nowadays expected to support browsers such as Mozilla Firefox, Opera, Google Chrome and Safari in addition to Internet Explorer and Netscape.
• There has been an attitude shift towards more compatibility in general. Thus, some level of cross-browser support is anticipated and only its absence needs to be known.
WEBSITE BUILDERS
Website builders are tools that allow the building of websites without manual code editing. They fall into two categories: on-line proprietary tools provided by web hosting companies, commonly designated for users to build their private site; and software which runs on a computer, producing pages off-line and which can then publish these web pages on any host. (The latter are frequently considered to be “website design software” rather than “website builders”.)