Web Design

Web design has to do with the way in which the content of a website is arranged. A website is a group of common webpages which content includes text, images, sounds and others, and should be ideally presented in a fashion that will appeal to the intended user, as well facilitate their interaction with the website. There are many different kinds of websites, including personal, commercial , government, non profit organization, affiliate, archive, answer, blogs, celebrity, community, content, corporate, dating, e-commerce, forum, gaming, humor, news, political, rating, religious, review, school, social networking and wiki websites. Regardless of the type of site however, the main objective is to lure visitors, and that is where web design comes in. In order to make a site both attractive and accessible, a series of principles may be followed, such as the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines and basic website planning. You can learn more about these website design related concepts right here at Threedozen.com.

Web Content Accessibility Guidelines

Also known as WCAG, these guidelines were developed by the World Wide Web Consortium with the goal of making web content accessible to disabled users in particular, and all users in general. Some of the web design standards included in this initiative are the use of semantic markup, a valid markup language, and hyperlinks. Semantic markup is strongly based on the concept of separation of presentation and content. The main objective of this website design concept is machine readability. While this refers to enabling machines, such as robots and crawlers, to discriminate meaning, machine readability ultimately benefits human users by presenting information to a greater quantity and variety of users. This is similar to the form versus function debate, where some consider these two terms to be mutually exclusive, whereas other believe that form follows function. Ideally, a balance between the two should be accomplished.

A markup language is an annotation system. In general terms, annotating refers to taking notes while reading a text, but in the context of web design, a markup language like HTML for example, is meant to be read by a web browser, which will translate it into visual or audible web pages. HTML has different types of elements with specific purposes. For instance, structural markup describes the function of the text, presentational markup describes the appearance of the text without regard to its purpose, and hypertext markup makes parts of the text link to other documents. The latter makes use of hyperlinks.

In web design, a hyperlink is a reference that leads to a document that the user can follow directly. In simpler terms, a webpage may contain a hyperlink to another webpage that the user can access, typically by clicking on the hyperlink. Hyperlinks should have meaning out of context. Phrases such as “click here” or “read more” should therefore be avoided in website design.

Web Design and Planning

Web design is not touch and go, on the contrary, it requires careful and extensive planning before a website is created and uploaded. Many factors need to be considered, the most of which are context, purpose and audience. Context is not too dissimilar, in broad strokes, to old fashioned print publishing. Not unlike a book, a website displays information in the form of text and images, and every web page can be likened to the pages in a book. The difference is that website design utilizes a framework based on display technology and digital code to build and keep up an environment from which to distribute information in a variety of formats. The purpose of the website must also be clearly established from the get go. It is vital to determine goals for the short and long term, as well as set up a foundation upon which the website can grow and improve. Closely related to purpose is a target audience. In order to help define a market base, a web designer may take into account a few elements such as audience characteristics, information preferences, computer specifications and web experience.

Further Web Design Considerations

Web design is a rather complex field that can be however very useful when exploited to its fullest capacity. We mentioned earlier the similarities between a website and book, but the truth is that a website is much more malleable entity, so much so that some webpages are categorized as dynamic, meaning that it constantly changes in both content and presentation, almost like a living, breathing thing. Website design offers a huge common ground where many disciplines interconnect, including but not limited to information systems, information technology, marketing, and communication design. As a matter of fact, there are so many potential aspects that it is difficult to condense it in a few lines, but visitors are welcome to browse through Threedozen.com and find out more useful facts about web design.

July 2016