What is Website Design
Introduction – What is Web Designing
Web designing is the second phase of web development. Its in this phase that you get information and mould it into systematic and logical content presented in the web in smart designs. Web designing is a process. It starts with web design planning, information collection to content arrangement and designing. The process ends at hosting and testing.
How to design a website – Types of websites.
There are two types of websites; static and dynamic.
Static websites are designed offline and uploaded after completion. The websites have static information that can only be changed by downloading the site, updating and uploading it again in a web server. The software to develop the site is installed in the computer and the website is usually saved in html format and uploaded to the web server. The language commonly used in developing static websites is html.
Dynamic websites are designed online. The designing software is loaded into the web server and becomes part of the website. The site runs on a database for storing information. This is a relatively new technology compared with the static websites. They are also referred to web 2.0 The most common dynamic websites are corporate sites, intranets and extranets and blogs. The sites can be added information instantly, change design in a click and are updated in real time. The language used in these websites is PHP.
How to design a website – Process
Website design planning
Web development starts with a need and idea. Most people will find the need to become more professional in their communication and profiling. Others have the need to acquire effective marketing strategy. All these needs moves the organization’s owners and managers to seek web solutions.
Planning is very necessary. You will need to plan if you will register the domain, configure emails and develop the site at the same time or you will give the phases some break. Its however recommended that you develop your site as soon as you register the domain to avoid ‘Emptiness’; where the visitors find an empty site upon visiting your site.
In web design planning, you look into the nature and size of information, features, the availability of the information (in digital or hardcopy form), the updatedness of the information, the audience of your website, the audience content needs and expectations, the content selection and formatting, grammar and choice of words.
Website design Information collection
There are two types of information gathered for web development. The text and the images.
Text information are the words used to develop content. These words join together to provide a story plot to be used in your site. When collecting text information, its important to focus on the information that define and describe your organization. This include the organization history, philosophy, pitch, product and service/program and projects details, personnel and partners information, contacts and variable important news and press. For organizations, most of the text information is contained in the profiles and catalogues.
Images are simply a thousand words as they say. You should select images that are harmonious with the text and theme. For instance if you are writing the content for a product, the image should be the product picture. The images should be sharp, quality and up-to-date.
How to develop a website design – Content arrangement
After you get the information (both text and image), it need to be arranged into pages. Websites’ content is arranged in pages and posts. Static websites contain only pages but dynamic sites, contain both pages and posts.
Page Development: Pages in websites are developed using software. Upon forming the website structure and design, the web designer develops the pages. The pages contains a harmonious combination of text and images. The images can be static or flashy. The choice of background color, font, text size, color and alignment is important.
Page arrangement: After creating pages, they need to be arranged systematically. The common arrangement is Home, About us, Products, Team and Contact. and for complex site, each page can have sub-pages and sub-sub pages.
How to create a website – structural design
In this case, we are referring to structure design. Website content is presented in beautiful structures for easy accessibility. Designing of these structures are solely dependent on the web designer’s creativity.
In static websites, designing is hard and tedious for the designer. After designing and uploading the site, changing design involves another tedious and time consuming process. This tend to make the process expensive and rigid. And a resultant content and design outdate.
For dynamic websites, the designs are referred to as themes. These themes are changeable instantly. They adopt the available content and only changes the structural design. The web designer have several theme guides that he can customize to design the theme for your website. The client can even choose the theme to adopt in the site. The process make it easy and flexible. And also cost effective.
Website hosting and testing
Website hosting is the uploading process. For static websites, the designer designs the website and content and after completion uploads it into the web server. For dynamic websites, the hosting is done by uploading the software first, then using it to design the website.
After hosting, its important to test your website using different web browsers. This ensures that the structures do not break and the features are functional. The most common browsers used are Microsoft internet explorer, firefox, opera and safari. To test, open the browser and open your site using the browser. Then see if the site ok.