Definition of Designing Web Pages
The World Wide Web is composed of literally billions of web pages. Each page has been designed by an author somewhere. In fact, some of the most complex web pages will have had many people involved in their designs. The process of designing web pages can be broken down into four main components: Graphic design, HTML structure, application design and user experience.
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Starting Out
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When designing a web page, there is one basic rule: Form Follows Function. You must have a good idea about what you want to accomplish with your web page. A simple page with words and images still needs to provide information in a clear and concise manner. An interactive web page needs decisions made about what tools or programming languages will be involved. A web page that's part of a larger site needs to incorporate any branding or navigation requirements the purpose of that page being lost or obscured.
Starting the design process before you have decided exactly what you want to achieve leads to delays, restarts and cluttered pages, so make sure you have a good idea what the end result is going to be.
Graphic Design
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Graphic designers are often employed specifically to design web pages and sites. Graphic design for the web is different than for magazine layouts where you know the size of the page down to the last millimeter. A skilled graphic designer for web pages will be able to incorporate a stylish look-and-feel for a web page with a fluid layout that can accommodate many types of browser and operating system. They will also be able to include any corporate branding that may be necessary, either by referring to existing style guides, or creating a new layout for the web page.
Because computers and web browsers come in all shapes and sizes, from small phones to wide-screen monitors, a well designed web page will accommodate the user's choice of browser as well as possible, being viewable on all sizes of screen.
Often graphic designers work with mock-ups for a web page in a program such as Photoshop, so that people can get an idea what the page should look like before they begin building it.
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HTML Structure
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HTML, or HyperText Markup Language, is the language of web pages. It is still part of the design process; this is how the graphic design for the web page is realised. Early on in the history of the web, web pages were based around HTML tables, but this created web pages that could not be easily changed. Nowadays, most pages are a combination of HTML and CSS, or Cascading Style Sheets. CSS allows the HTML to focus on what the web page is saying, while the CSS determines where the HTML goes on the web page and what it looks like.
Many different web pages can refer to the same CSS file, so if you want to change the look of every single web page at once, you can just alter the CSS in one place.
Application Design
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If you want your web page to have some dynamic activity, you must also work out how this is best accomplished. If your web page is linked to a database, there are a number of different scripting languages, such as Perl or the .NET family of languages, which, in combination with the server that hosts the site, can deliver a different web page using the results from the database. Some sites are almost entirely database driven, and are run by a CMS, or Content Management System, such as Drupal, Plone or Joombla.
Alternately, a web page can run some scripts on the page itself, without referring to the server. Javascript is the most common scripting language for this, and it can even change the look of the page dynamically if required.
The application design involves deciding what is the best way to achieve your goals. A lot will depend upon the server the website is running on, the languages available (and that the programmer knows) and how many people you expect to use the site.
User Experience
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Sometimes, a great web page can be flawed. It might have images that are too large in size to be downloaded quickly. It might have poor navigation or search, so that users cannot find what they need. It might have large amounts of text that are not easily able to be read on a screen, or links with misspellings that do not work. A good graphic design can stop some of these from being an issue, but it can be hard to tell until things are up and running. The final part of web page design is therefore testing the user experience, preferably with people who are not familiar with the web page. This allows the designers to tweak the page until it's just right.
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- Photo Credit Helle Glaskugel World Wide Web image by Marem from Fotolia.com
