Many people use the term website design to describe creation of the entire website, while others make a distinction between web design, which involves the appearance of the website and web structure which is defined by its coding.
We want to consider the larger angle so that we get a good grounding in the subject.
The two parts of website consist of the visible part: the frontend, and the behind-the-scenes part: the backend.
The frontend includes the HTML and JavaScript code which most browsers interpret and use to display the final output.
The backend is not visible and is usually written in programming code such as PHP, ASP or Perl. This coding handles form processing, updating databases, sending out confirmation emails, writing logs, in fact all manner of functions.
Cross-browser compatible.
This is an important issue for web designers. The main internet browser programs are Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera and Safari. A good designer will ensure that the finished website looks good in these four main browsers. This is not as easy as it seems because each browser interprets the html code slightly differently.
If you are outsourcing design work, always stipulate that the design must look similar in these four browsers. It can not always look the same, but each browser view should look good.
Criteria to Judge a Good Web Design
The first rule is that the design should accomplish the goal of the website.
If that is to achieve sales, then it must do that. To effectively reach any goal the design needs to be visually appealing.
There are seven areas where quality needs to be high:
* Achieve the goal of the website
* Have valid code
* Be visually appealing
* Be easy to understand by the user
* Be reasonably fast loading
* Consider and address access issues for disabled users
* Be optimized for high search engine ranking
Successful web design involves following a methodical design process from beginning to end. Using web building products may result in cumbersome, inefficient and slow loading pages. It is usually much better to hand code all your work.
Interestingly, although a bad visual design will be obvious at first glance, a design that looks stunning, can still be very bad design.
If the website is slow loading, or difficult to understand, then it will not meet its objectives. A really well designed website will both look great and meet its goals by maintaining a simple and well thought design.
