Web Design, Unique Web Design

Creating and arranging web pages in order to build up a website (or another web application) is the process called web design. A website can be seen as an archive of information held in electronic files found on one or possibly more web servers. Web content makes up the information and interactive features that are available on a web page. It can be visual or aural and can include: text, images sounds, videos, and even data, documents, applications, saved emails, and much more. Web content is broadly defined as anything the user interacts with when opening and reading a web page.

The term “web design” encompasses the entire conceptual process of planning out the actual website, though its end result is web content in the form of web pages presented on the Internet. Thus, web content is the goal and the most important aspect of web design.

Using web design tags such as HTML, XHMTL, and XML, web content in the form of text, forms, and bit-mapped images (GIFs, JPEGS, and PNGs) can be put onto a web page. More complex media display (vector graphics, animations, videos, sounds, and the like) requires using plug-ins like Flash, Quicktime, and Java run-time environment. As a further function of web design tags, HTML and XHMTL embed such plug-ins into a web page. HTML and XHMTL not only do this, but also are used to essentially write websites. Their importance to web design cannot be overstated.

In web design, web pages are either static or dynamic.

Static web pages stay the same. On such a web page, content and layout do not change every time a user performs an action unless a web master or programmer does a manual update.

Dynamic web pages are the opposite. Their content or appearance (sometimes both) change depending on the user’s interaction with the web page and the “computing environment.” The “computing environment” broadly encompasses the actual user, the time, the database, any modifications to the database or web page, and anything else involving the user’s experiencing the web page. For example, using Javascript, Jscript, Actionscript, media players, and PDF reader plug-ins, the user might change content and alter DOM (DHTML) elements. Also, users might employ server-side scripting languages such as Coldfusion, ASP, JSP, Perl, PHP, and python to compile dynamic content onto a server.

All of this is possible because of Tim Berners-Lee.

In August 1991, he created and published the first website, thus becoming the founder of web design and the World Wide Web. For decades, the Internet had already carried both email and Usenet. Hypertext had also been in existence for decades, though in a limited form that could only browse information stored on a single computer. Berners-Lee combined Internet communication (specifically email and Usenet) with hypertext to conceive of web design and resulted in a website.

Early web design used a basic version of HTML, which gave the first websites a simple structure mostly consisting of headings and paragraphs, but also the ability to link to other wbesites using hypertext. This led to easy navigation between web pages via hyperlinks. From there, the World Wide Web (and web and graphic design) grew more complex and developed over the years into the single most significant technological advancement since the printing print.