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Web design is a broad term covering many different skills and disciplines that are used in the production and maintenance of web pages. The different areas of web design include; web graphic design, interface design, authoring; including standardised code and proprietary software, user experience design and search engine optimisation. Often web designers will work in teams covering different aspects of the design process, although some designers will cover them all. The term web design is normally used to describe the design process relating to the front-end (client side) design of a website including writing mark up, but this is a grey area as this is also covered by web development. Web designers are expected to have an awareness of usability and if their role involves creating mark up then they are also expected to be up to date with web accessibility guidelines.
Tools and Technologies
Web designers may use a variety of different tools depending on what part of the production process they are involved in. These tools are often updated by newer versions but the principals remain the same. Web graphic designers will normally use vector and raster graphics packages for creating web formatted imagery or design prototypes. Technologies used for creating the websites could include, standardised mark up which could be hand coded or WYSIWYG editing software, the quality of the code isn't guaranteed by ether approach. There is also proprietary software based on plug-ins that bypasses the client’s browsers version, these are often WYSIWYG but with the option of using the software’s scripting language. Search engine optimisation tools may be used to check search engine ranking and suggest improvements. Other tools web designers might use include mark up validators[1] and other testing tools for usability and accessibility to ensure their web sites meet disability guidelines[2].
HTML and XHTML
XHTML is HTML 4.01 re-formatted as XML, in the way that HTML was previously based upon SGML.[3] The syntactic rules of XML are less flexible than SGML, which means that XML is simpler to process and validate, although it is more demanding of accuracy for hand-editing. The first XHTML standard was a simple reformulation of the HTML standard (i.e. the same tags were used) and did not make changes other than those directly related to the syntax. Later XHTML standards began to revise the sets of tags in use as well, although these standards were never widely adopted.
XHTML is widely used on the web, although this was not well understood by web designers, and was largely driven by fashion than by technical advances. Further development of the XHTML standard has been abandoned, although the new standard, HTML5, is now available and this also supports an XML serialization.
Changes and updates
Websites may undergo small tweaks and changes after they go live, but major updates and re-designs may be undertaken periodically.
CMS
Some website building platforms called Content Management System's (CMS) allow novice user's to update and change their existing content and to a lesser extent the site designs, without having to know complex code (HTML, CSS). User's can perform "Visual Edits" rather then the usual coded edits which gives the users free range to edit the sites themselves.
See also
References
External links
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