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Web Design
Web design is the design or designing of a Web page, Website or Web application. The term generally refers to the graphical side of Web development using images, CSS and one of the HTML standards. When the Internet was first invented, the World Wide Web hadn't yet made its entrance. When it did, Web creation consisted of a basic markup language, called HTML, that included some formatting options, and the ability to link pages together using hyperlinks. It was this feature that characterized the Web among other communication methods, and characterized Web creation among other creation methods. Because of this unique behaviour of the World Wide Web, and the unique behaviour it encouraged in users, Web creation would prove to be unlike any other form of design before or since, with the possible exception of interactive CD-ROM design. As the Web and Web creation progressed, the markup language used to make it, known as HTML, became more complex and flexible. Things like tables, which could be used to display tabular information, were soon subverted for use as invisible layout devices. With the advent of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), table based layout is increasingly regarded as outdated. Database integration technologies such as server-side scripting (see CGI, PHP, ASP.NET, ASP, JSP, and ColdFusion) and design standards like CSS further changed and enhanced the way the Web was made. The introduction of Macromedia Flash into an already interactivity-ready scene has further changed the face of the Web, giving new power to designers and media creators, and offering new interactivity features to users. Flash is much more restrictive than the open HTML format, though, requiring a proprietary plugin to be seen, and it does not integrate with most web browser UI features like the "Back" button. Programmers were the original web page designers in the early 1990s. Currently most web creators come from a graphic artist background in print, where the artist has absolute control over the size and dimensions of all aspects of the creation.. On the web however, the Web designer has no control over several factors, especially the width of the browser window. Many designers compensate for this by wrapping their entire webpage in a fixed width box, essentially limiting it to an exact pixel-perfect value, which is a fixed layout. Some create the illusion of liquidity by building the graphics for their webpage at a size larger than any current standard monitor size (however, at the current rate of monitor supersizing, this method will soon become obsolete). Other designers say that this is bad because it ignores the preferences of the user, who might have their browser sized a specific way that they like best. These people propose a liquid layout, where the size of the Web page adjusts itself based on the size of the browser window. There is a usability reason (rather than wanting control) for why a designer may choose a more fixed layout. Studies have shown that there is usually an optimal line width in terms of readability. One rule to appear from such studies is that lines should be between 40-60 characters long, or approximately 11 words per line. This decision of which style of layout to use is often made on a case by case basis, depending on the needs and audience of the website. Macromedia Flash is a robust graphics animation/application development program used to create and deliver dynamic content, media (such as sound and video), and interactive applications over the web via the browser. Many graphic artists use Flash because it gives them exact control over every part of the design, and anything can be animated and generally "jazzed up." Some application designers enjoy flash because it lets them create applications that don't have to be refreshed or go to a new web page every time an action occurs. There are many sites which forego HTML entirely for Flash. Flash detractors claim that Flash websites tend to be poorly designed, and often use confusing and non-standard user-interfaces. Up until recently, search engines have been unable to index Flash objects, which has prevented stores from having their products easily found. It is possible to specify alternate content to be displayed for browsers that do not support Flash. Using alternate content also helps search engines to understand the page, and can result in much better visibility for the page. The most recent incarnation of Flash's scripting language (called "actionscript", which is an ECMA language similar to JavaScript) incorporates long-awaited usability features, such as respecting the browser's font size and allowing blind users to use screen readers. Actionscript 2.0 is an Object-Oriented language, allowing the use of CSS, XML, and the creation of class-based web applications. The final consensus is that Flash is simply a tool, and like all tools it takes a skilful craftsperson to know when, and how, to use it properly. Macromedia's other two products, Fireworks and Dreamweaver, makes Flash integration with graphics and HTML a lot easier. Back when Netscape Navigator 4 dominated the browser market, the popular (but now deprecated) solution available for designers to lay out a Web page was by using tables. Often even simple designs for a page would require dozens of tables nested in each other. Many web templates in Dreamweaver still use this technique today. Navigator 4 didn't support CSS to a useful degree, so it simply wasn't used. After the browser wars were over, and Internet Explorer dominated the market, designers started turning towards CSS as an alternate, better means of laying out their pages. CSS proponents say that tables should only be used for tabular data, not for layout. Using CSS instead of tables also returns HTML to a semantic markup, which helps bots and search engines understand what's going on in a web page. Today, all modern Web browsers now support CSS with different degrees of limitations. However, one of the main points against CSS is that by relying on it exclusively, control is essentially relinquished as each browser has its own quirks which result in a slightly different page display. This is especially a problem as not every browser supports the same subset of CSS codes. For some designers used to the creating table-based layouts, developing Web sites in CSS often becomes a matter of replicating what can be done with tables, leading some to find CSS design rather cumbersome. For example, it has proved rather difficult to produce certain creation elements, such as vertical positioning, and full-length footers in a design using absolute positions. These days most modern browsers have solved most of these quirks in CSS rendering and this has made many different CSS layouts possible. However, people still continue to use old browsers which do not get updated any more. Most notable among these are Internet Explorer 5 and 5.5 which, according to some web creators, are becoming the new Netscape Navigator 4 — a block that holds the internet back from converting to CSS design. Since so many web developers have a graphic arts background, they often pay more attention to how a page looks, without considering how visitors are going to find the page. On the other side of the issue, search engine optimization consultants (SEOs) obsess about how well a web site works: how much traffic it generates, and how many sales it makes. As a result, the designers and SEOs often end up in disputes where the designer wants more 'pretty' graphics, and the SEO wants lots of 'ugly' keyword-rich text, bullet lists, and text links.
Dynamic web design
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