Well, hello there! Welcome to this blog, where we talk about web designing, its fundamentals and its importance. I see you have gone against the title and have chosen to read this blog. Let me tell you, web designing may be something that’s very technical in nature, but it is also a form of art. Every website is a story and it’s the web design that tells that story either visually or with words.  Developing a good web design requires creativity and a bit of intuition and by reading this blog, you’ve already exhibited the trait of being curious! Curiosity is a great motivator for self learning and self learning plays a huge role in web design. Website design is a domain that requires you to constantly be on your toes by learning about new developments and techniques. Website designing requires great communication skills to get a clear and precise message across.

What is website designing? To put it simply, website designing is the process of creating websites. It includes several different aspects of a website, such as web page layout, content production, and graphic design. It is essential to note that while the terms ‘web design’ and ‘web development’ are often used interchangeably, web design is technically a subset of the broader category of web development.

Fundamentals:

We have been talking about web designing but are you aware of how basic web designing is done? It is important to lay down the fundamentals of web designing:

• The Technicalities of aWebsite

Websites are created using a markup language called Hypertext MarkupLanguage (HTML). Web designers build web pages using HTML tags that define the content and metadata of each page. The layout and appearance of the elements within a webpage are typically defined using CSS, or cascading style sheets. Therefore, most websites include a combination of HTML and CSS that defines how each page will appear in a browser.

Others use different types of editors. These editors provide a visual interface for designing the webpage layout and the software automatically generates the correspondingHTML and CSS code. Another popular way of web design is with a system likeWordPress. This provides a different website template that can be used as a starting point for a new website. Webmasters can then add content and customize the layout using a web-based interface.

While HTML and CSS are used to design the look and feel of a website, images must be created separately. Therefore, graphic design may overlap with web design, since graphic designers often create images for use on the Web.

To know more about how to actually make a web page, there’s a great wikiHow article available here.

• Design

Design, obviously, is a key part of web design. It includes the principles of design(balance, contrast, unity etc.) and the design elements (lines, shapes, texture, color etc.). It is essential to base the design around the knowledge on the target audience. The audience must be considered first and then the required elements may be added or removed from the web design.

The audience must understand what the website has been designed for at the first glance. Thus images, symbols, logos etc are more effective and useful in website designing. Use imagery and icons to communicate whenever possible in your web design. There are some universal icons that people are trained to respond to. The magnifying glass (search), the house (home page) and floppy disk (save) are ingrained into your users already.Take advantage of those visual shortcuts while web designing.

Color makes all the difference, especially as our screens get better on our phones and tablets. It is a facet of design that can be a really key part of the story your website design wants to tell. Just use color to support content, not decorate a page and often if you are using a photo, the colors in the web design should be sampled from the photos used so your web design has a nice unified feel. One of the best rules to go with is to use complimentary colors so as to have a balance of both warm and cold colours in the website.

Choose fonts that support the content! There are literally thousands of fonts to choose from. It is up to the web designer to mix and match – but they must remember that it’s best practice to use only up to three fonts at a time—a nice headline font, one for the main body of text, and then one for any sort of call-out the web designer might need.

There are two ways websites are generated:

• Static Websites

A static website design stores a unique file for every page of a static website. Each time that webpage is requested, the same content is returned. This content is created once, during the design of the website. It is usually manually authored, although some sites use an automated creation process, whose results are stored long-term as completed pages. 

The benefits of a static website designs are that they are simpler to host, as their server only needed to serve static content, not execute server-side scripts. This required less server administration and had less chance of exposing security holes. They could also serve pages more quickly, on low-cost server hardware. These advantage became less important as cheap web hosting expanded to also offer dynamic features, and virtual servers offered high performance for short intervals at low cost.

Almost all websites have some static content, as supporting assets such as images and style sheets are usually static, even on a website with highly dynamic pages.

• Dynamic Websites

Dynamic websites are generated on the fly and use server-side technology to generate web pages. They typically extract their content from one or more back-end databases: some are database queries across a relational database to query a catalogue or to summarise numeric information, others may use a document database to store larger units of content, such as blog posts or wiki articles. The skill set needed to develop dynamic web pages is much broader than for a static page, involving server-side and database coding as well as client-side interface design. Even medium-sized dynamic projects are thus almost always a team effort.

Both of these approaches have now been supplanted for many websites by higher-level application-focused tools such as content management systems.These build on top of general purpose coding platforms and assume that a website exists to offer content according to one of several well recognised models, such as a wiki or a user forum. These tools make the implementation of such a site very easy, and a purely organisational and design-based task, without requiring any coding.

Editing the content itself can be done both in the site itself, and with the use of third-party software.The ability to edit all pages is provided to a specific category of users (for example, administrators, or registered users). In some cases, anonymous users are allowed to edit certain web content, which is less frequent (for example, on forums – adding messages). An example of a site with an anonymous change is Wikipedia.

Importance:

Website Designing is now essential! Its importance is growing with the advancement of technology, especially for businesses and companies that want to take their profits to the next level and reach more people.

In today’s day and age, not having an online presence is unimaginable! Everything is now online and highlighting your online presence is very important. The basic element that makes up an online presence is web design. The website design can either make or break a business. What makes big e-commerce websites like Flipkart, Amazon, Snapdeal, Nykaa, and MakeMyTrip so popular?

The answer to this question is great website designing! You see, when it comes to website designing, communication and knowledge of what the target audience is important. The above mentioned e-commerce websites were designed to make the websites:

1. Easy to find! This is essential when your website has many web pages. It must be noted that when website navigation is developed well in the website design, users can easily explore and understand your website. A simple navigation is the best for both the web design and users.
2. Deliver an accurate message!  Readers tend to remember a message when it is concise and they can relate to it. Overdoing the visuals in the web design leads to can lead to a visual cluster which makes the website disinteresting.
3.  By making the website look more welcoming and trustworthy to visitors. The traffic of the website increases, and there is an improvement or boost in promotions of the business.
4. By organizing and SearchEngine Optimization! As we all know, it is most comfortable to read a book from left to right, up and down. We read web pages in the similar manner. While website designing, the designers use the same reading pattern. It is because of this reason that designers put most of the important information in the upper left area of the web page. It increases the chances of relaying your message to the visitors who can become your customers. Aside from organization, utilizing the visible areas for important website details can also improve the search engine optimization or SEO. This happens when related key words are incorporated in the HTML text. This gives search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing an opportunity to crawl into your website easily, increasing your search engine placement (higher in the search results) and give your website or firm a more overall visibility.

At the most basic level, a business should invest in some level of web design because their businesses are most likely to do the same. If your site looks poorly made by an amateur, and a direct competitor’s site look professionally made and trustworthy, potential customers will choose your competitor. You can go even further than simply bringing your website up to par with the competition, however. Investing in web design is a great way to set yourself apart from your competitors.  Most businesses within an industry have essentially the same resources available to them when building their services. Web design is the one of the only areas where a business can go above and beyond, making the business appear to be the obvious choice through a gorgeously made website.

There are two primary jobs involved in creating a website:the web designer and web developer, who often work closely together on a website. The web designers are responsible for the visual aspect, which includes the layout, coloring and typography of a web page. Further jobs involved in web design include graphic designing (create visuals for the site such as logos, layouts and buttons), SEO writers to recommend the correct words to be incorporated within the website design, internet marketing specialists etc.

The growing popularity of online shopping and virtual communication is confusing or even scary to the some. Web design is a great way to create a user-friendly environment where people come for helpful tips and best practices.