Learning Web Design Alice Springs NT

Since the invention of the World Wide Web in 1990 by Tim Berners-Lee the web has grown apace, as has the field of web design and development. In the beginning, web design was the preserve of the academic community and information technology profession. It was soon adopted by amateurs who taught themselves web site design skills and helped to drive forward the personal computing revolution.

Internet service providers, the companies who provide access to the Internet, realized this and started to provide space on the web to their customers in which they could place their web page design and content for the connected world to see.

The early World Wide Web community did not welcome commercial use of the web and web design technology, but companies soon grasped the potential of web design and development to improve their business. These days, custom web design is big business and web design and development is ubiquitous in the commercial, government and social spheres.

The buzz on the World Wide Web today is about Web 2.0. This encompasses a whole raft of new web design and development technologies. These include blogging (essentially public diary-keeping), news feeds (that bring the web to you), social networking (online communities) and AJAX (seamless changing of content in the web browser window). Even advertising is informing custom web design with companies like Google, Amazon, Yahoo and many others making it easy to incorporate paid advertising into web page design. Web site design has never been healthier or more diverse.

The easiest way to get into web design is to use web authoring software. This kind of software uses WYSIWYG ("what you see is what you get") interfaces so you can create web page design layouts graphically rather than writing code directly in text. Most of this software also allows you to tweak the code if you have the skill and the inclination.

Many such authoring packages provide templates for web site designs, making web design and development quick and easy even for novices, provided that they have some experience in using applications in a graphical user interface such as the windowing systems provided by all modern operating systems. The power of professional web software packages means that they can produce custom web design solutions as well as web design and development in standard structures.

For those who prefer to work within the Microsoft environment, their web page editor may be the right choice for web site design and is a mid priced solution. Other web developers with a preference for Apple Macs might favor the Adobe software suite, including their authoring, photo editing and illustration software. This makes for a heavyweight all-in-one solution with a price tag to match for the seasoned custom web design practitioner. This comprehensive approach to web site design is also taken by Macromedia's package which features their web editing, animation and graphics products.

There are also open source web authoring programs that are essentially free. One of these is Nvu (pronounced N-view) which, whilst lacking a graphics editor, can be used for web site design regardless of whether the user has knowledge of coding. It can also be used to add web page designs to a website using FTP (File Transfer Protocol).

HTML stands for Hyper Text Markup Language and is the foundation of almost all websites and therefore of web site design. It was designed to provide the structure and content of web pages and evolved to support the display of colors, fonts, layouts and other purely stylistic and visual elements.

The code for a HTML document looks like plain language interspersed with odd symbol, letter and number combinations. These are the tags that turn the plain text into a web page design. Tags act like brackets around text and are either opening tags or closing tags. Each tag begins with a 'less than' symbol, is followed by letters indicating how the following text is to be displayed or treated, and ends with a 'greater than' symbol which is preceded by a 'forward slash' if it is a closing tag.

There are tags for many elements of a document, including headings, paragraphs, tables and hyperlinks, the essential feature in all web site design and how the web works. There are several other markup languages related to HTML which use other tags but work in a similar way to achieve specialist and custom web design.

The modern companion to HTML is CSS, which stands for Cascading Style Sheets. This handles the layout and appearance aspects of web design and development in a more flexible and efficient way than can be achieved by HTML. CSS can be integrated into HTML tags but is best used by adding references to CSS 'classes' in those tags to refer to 'properties' elsewhere in the web page design or, preferably, an entirely separate file. Changes to the style and layout across a web site design can be achieved by modifying a single file rather than every single page individually. This has benefits for the speed of web design and development.

Scripting is a way to achieve custom web design by using programming languages to change the appearance of a web page design or the information that it holds. There are two types of scripts; those that run on the computer of the visitor to the web site (client side scripting) and those that run on the server before the web page is provided to the visitor's computer (server side scripting).

Web site design can be enhanced in many ways by client side scripting languages such as JavaScript. One often seen effect achieved by scripting is dynamic hyperlink menus for site navigation. This web design trick allows links to change when the mouse pointer is positioned over them and again when it is moved away. A basic kind of animation can be achieved, with sub menus appearing and disappearing as required.

Other aspects of web design and development achieved with client side scripting include the creation of cookies on the visitor's machine, the validation of data entered into forms in order to reduce the load on the server, and the detection of the web browser that the visitor is using to achieve a custom web design tailored to its quirks. It can also launch pop up boxes, although this web design practice is now frowned upon and pop up boxes are avoided by web site visitors.

Server side scripting is a related technique that is mainly used for interactions with databases, although it can handle cookie use, browser detection and other tasks in common with client side scripting. There are proprietary and open source scripting languages for web design and development, many of them paired with the database program that is their natural partner.

Database integration allows for better custom web design and has many different applications. There are a number of different database programs available for use in web site design to create functionality unavailable with a static web design. The language used in these database applications is usually SQL, properly pronounced 'ess-cue-ell' but sometimes referred to as 'sequel', which stands for Structured Query Language.

A web database can hold any kind of information imaginable, from product details to contact addresses, the texts of articles, geographical data and just about anything else that a custom web design could require. Web design and development becomes much simpler and more effective when the content of the web page design is provided by a database. The number of pages and web page designs can be kept to a minimum, making the maintenance of a web site design quicker and less susceptible to errors.

Databases are behind many different types of web applications, from mapping services to web logs (commonly referred to as blogs), e-commerce shops and social networking web sites. Databases can also form the backbone of web site design, holding HTML, CSS and other data as part of an overarching CMS (content management system). This approach to web design and development makes almost every element of a web site design flexible and makes for a true custom web design.

Database use in a web design allows interaction with the user, not only by helping to provide customized content but enabling the user to add to the content and even the web page design, as happens in bulletin boards and social networking sites. It also allows for the collection of information about visitors to a site. This can be used to improve the web design and development of the site.

The craze for web logs has grown and grown, influencing web site design on the way and being adopted by business as a promotional tool in company web design, often complementing the advertising space bought in the web page designs of other sites.

Still the main exponents of blogging are private individuals who choose to publish details of their lives and thoughts for their friends, family or the whole world to see. These web journals and diaries can be fascinating, insightful and compelling. As a side effect, blogs have introduced a whole new generation of web users to the world of web design.

Blog web page design is often achieved through online services that provide a simple user interface for uploading blog entries, a common but customizable web site design and hosting for the blog. Examples of such services are Blogger, LiveJournal and MySpace. Blogging services often provide the functionality of social networking sites in their web design, allowing users to upload a variety of different media as content for their web page design and to contact and interact with other users of the service.

There are proprietary and open source solutions for web design and development specifically for blogging. These are useful for those with experience of web site design, especially with coding and scripting skills, to create blogs that are independent of the dedicated blogging sites and the restrictions on the web page design that they often entail. A blog with a custom web design can be preferred by those who want to stand out from the crowd, develop their own presence on the web or integrate a blog into an existing web site design. This approach allows a web design with a far broader scope than a simple blog.

Another web design innovation of recent years has been the RSS feed, said by most to stand for Really Simple Syndication and encompassing earlier technologies also called RSS (Rich Site Summary) and RDF (Resource Description Framework). A similar system is called Atom. This technology uses a markup language called XML (for eXtensible Markup Language) that formats plain text files so that they can be read and manipulated by software, often being placed in the web page design of other sites.

This new form of web design allows for traditional browsers to be bypassed and web content displayed by stand alone newsreader software. This software has to cope with the incompatibility of the two RSS types and Atom. Web site design often avoids this problem by offering both RSS and Atom feeds. Aggregators are a type of web site design that combine news feeds from many sites and have the advantage of being usable by anyone with web access and a browser.

An exciting use of RSS in web design and development is in the distribution of podcasts, audio or video files that are published periodically to the web that may take the form of blog entries, radio shows, lectures and lessons, guided tours or anything else suited to those media and to web site design. Podcasts can be automatically downloaded to computers for listening or transfer to mp3 players.

The availability of RSS feeds is often displayed in web page designs by orange and white graphics marked 'subscribe', 'XML' or 'RSS' or by the distinctive browser icon.

The term AJAX stands for Asynchronous JavaScript And XML, two web design technologies that have been around for some time but have found new life in custom web design due to the growth in broadband Internet and developments in web browsers and standards. Confusingly, JavaScript is not the only programming language that can be used in AJAX web design and development and XML is only one data format that such web site designs can exploit.

Using JavaScript to load content into an existing web page design is an efficient use of bandwidth, especially where the web site design requires many changes to image file data. Small packets of data are exchanged between the server and the web page updated without being refreshed with every change. This approach to website design produces a seamless application more like local software than a traditional web site, designed for interactivity and speed.

Of the web sites using AJAX, mapping services are probably the best known. AJAX web design allows live interaction with map data and other embedded information such as sound, video, images and text that is responsive to user action without interrupting the service. Mixing and matching data sources means that each implementation of an AJAX web page design functions differently to produce unique results, giving innovative and custom web design.

A popular photo sharing site is another example of AJAX web design innovation. The slide show feature of the web site design uses the technology to play, pause and display information about the pictures in the show. When displaying the photos, portions therein that are outlined and the captions added to the outlines are superimposed for viewing.

A big part of good web design is usability. This encompasses many issues, including those pertaining to users with disabilities and their accommodation by the web site design.

A fundamental part of usability is to have clear navigation within the web site design. A site structure and web page design that is easy to navigate is essential to retain visitors, the primary aim of web design and development. Organized and hierarchical link menus using established web site design conventions are good. A site map accessible through a link on the front page is also helpful. For visitors with visual impairments, implementing an access keys scheme where keyboard shortcuts lead to standard web page types improves accessibility.

Retaining visitors is easier with an uncluttered and quickly understandable web page design. Related to this and to clear navigation is the careful use of color in web site design. Unpleasant color combinations, very small fonts and lack of contrast make web page designs difficult to read even with near perfect eyesight. Visitors with color blindness or color vision deficiency may miss information even in careful and tasteful web design color schemes. Color blindness simulation software can be used to check the accessibility of a web site design.

The structure of a web page design can cause problems for users of screen reading software if the layout is achieved with HTML tables, frames or poorly planned divisions. Web site design by frames should be avoided, tables used only for appropriate data and CSS used to organize the divisions within a web page design properly.

The World Wide Web Consortium has developed the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines to inform custom web design for comprehensive accessibility.