Web design is the art of developing presentations of content that is historically delivered to end user via the World Wide Web. The presentations are typically in the form of hypertext or hypermedia and are submitted to the World Wide Web with aid of a web browser or any other software that that is compatible for web applications such as microblogging clients, Internet television clients as well as RSS readers.
Design is aimed at creating a web site. A web site is a compilation of electronic files that are used a on a web server or servers. The electronic files are used to present various contents as well as interactive features or interfaces to end users in the form of web pages the moment a command request is sent. This capability in design enables a multiplicity of element such as bit-mapped images (in formats such as.gif and.jpeg), text, and forms to be placed on the particular page using a variety of applications such as hyper text markup language ( HTML), XML and XHTML tags. In order to display more intricate media such videos, sounds, animations, and vector graphics, the person involved in design has to incorporate a variety of specialized add-on as such as QuickTime, Flash and the Java run-time environment among other applications . Such activities also require plug-ins to be embedded into the web page by making use of HTML or XHTML tags.
New strategies have seen significant improvements in the compliance of browsers with W3C standards. This has led to a general acceptance and application of XHTML and XML methods in combination with Cascading Style Sheets (that is CSS) to place and manipulate the objects and elements contained in a web page. The latest proposals and standards in web design are aimed at enabling any given browser to produce a side array of media as well as accessibility alternatives to the client without necessarily having to employ plug-ins. This has made web design not only advanced but also enjoyable. In web design, web pages are generally classified into two major groups. The pages can be either dynamic or static. As the name implies, static pages do not change their content as well as layout every time a request is made. Changes to such pages can only be made when a person with expertise in web design – such as a web master or web programmer updates the particular page or pages manually.
On the other hand, dynamic web pages adjust their content as well as appearance depending on the end user's input commands or interaction. Changes in dynamic web pages can also occur due to the settings of the computer environment as formulated in the process of web design. Such settings include time, user preference, data configurations and so forth. The web page content can be modified from the client's side (that is, the end user's computer) through applying script languages related to the client side. Such languages are commonly used in web design and include Actionscript, JavaScript, JScript, and many others. The languages are specifically used to change DOM settings by use of DHTML. Dynamic content is very important in web design since it is often times complains with the server that uses server-side scripting language formats such as PHP, Perl, ASP, ColdFusion, and JSP. Both ways of changing the contents of dynamic web pages involve complex web design applications.
Web design is a growing field and this is necessitated by the increasing knowledge in information technology. As a result, a line has been drawn between this field and other related fields such as web development and web programming.
