Understand Web Design

To make a website that accords with the World Wide Web Consortium, you have to divide the process of making a website into three different parts, namely: structure of data, layout and style of data, and functions of data. The World Wide Web Consortium, or W3C for short, decides the standard for website design on the internet.

For many years, the standard language for structure of data has been Hyper Text Markup Language, or HTML. Now we have other, similar languages to use, the most popular being Extensible Hyper Text Markup Language (XHTML) and Extensible Markup Language (XML.)

For year's designers were forced to use HTML as a means for style and layout of data; this has now changed with the introduction of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS.) CSS is a language especially made for how you want your web content to look, and where it should be placed on the page. Instead of having to rely on tables and repeated style information, designers can now make one CSS file with all the style and placement information. Using CSS gives designers more creative freedom, and it makes the page more accessible to people with disabilities.

You use functions to make your data do something, perhaps interact with the browser or interact with the server that hosts the web page. To do this you use scripting. There are two different classifications of scripting languages; client side scripting and server side scripting.

Client side scripting interacts only with your browser. Client side scripting doesn't need to interact with the server, so it's a bit faster to load, but by not interacting with the server there are less things you can do with it. It is often used to make your site a bit more dynamic, and can create fancy navigation systems and scrolling images etc. The most popular client side scripting language is JavaScript.

Server side scripting is where the big boys come to play. Here you have fully functional programming languages like PHP, ASP.net and Perl. You can use server side scripts to make your site truly interactive. Server side scripts are used in shopping carts, forms that send you or your client information, and to interact with a database.

Many design teams divide the work and let one person do the structure and style of data, while the other person takes care of the functions of data.