Confabulate

These days, websites have become the first source of communication between the customers and the company. Customers/visitors have become so much familiar with the different web designs, that they can easily make out the differences between a good and poor web design. As per the definition of web design given in wikipedia, ”Web design is the skill of creating presentations of content and then delivers to an end-user through the World Wide Web, by way of a Web browser or other Web-enabled software like Internet television clients, micro blogging clients and RSS readers.”
The Intent of Web design is create a website. Website consists of text, images and rich content and it should be interactive. These days, more people are opting for custom web design as it caters to the particular business needs and hence proves more fruitful in terms of boosting business sales and marketing perspective.

Background of Web Design

In August 1991, first website is published by Tim Berners-Lee. He was the first to combine Internet communication with hypertext. Websites are written in HTML , earlier the HTML were very basic which only provide a website with basic structure and linking is done by using hypertext.

As web design progressed fast, HTML changed and become more complex and flexible and ability to add images and tables to a page. After that Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) came into existence, with this table-based layout becomes outdated. Time to time coding of websites as well as visual design changes as new programs and utilities evolve. Now the need to convert PSD to HTML emerged as the urgency of the hour and hence it led to the growth of markup service industry.

Benefits of Web Design

Companies which a business on the web should have their website professionally designed so that it helps in many ways:

1. Expands customer reach
2. Higher market visibility
3. Promotes Business
4. Ease of contact
5. Creates Credibility
6. It guides visitors in learning and purchasing from the internet.
7. Good web site design create a ever lasting impression on the visitors.

Now a days, more and more people are opting for CMS development. As it forms an easy way out to handle and manage websites on our own, without being dependent on designers and developers. Joomla, Wordpress, Drupal are the most widely used content management systems. *On the other note, you may even hire joomla developers at PixelCrayons on hourly basis.

Types of Approach towards Web Design

There are five types of design approaches:

Designer Philosophy

This type of technique is used mostly by smaller, designed-focused enterprises. As website is built by a designer’s which uses his or her creativity as well as personal view to create a website which sometimes loved by users but sometimes hated by others. This concept fails for the websites which deals with large amounts of content.

Enterprise Design

It is one of the most common types of design. Here website is designed with help of everyone in the company as each department is responsible of its own part of the site but with this users get confused, lost and get out of it quickly.

Content-Centered

As Content is another big issue. A Good website should have rich content, Content should not be grouped by so many ways as it gives a negative impact on users, Moreover website should be interactive enough to gain a customer’s attention.

Technology Driven Design

This technique is used frequently as the focus is on implementation and to reach to a final product quickly. Here solutions are available at a relatively low cost or free but they are designed to fit general needs. It is typically hard to use and not even cost effective for long term.

User Experience Driven Design

It is also called user centered design (UCD). It is popular among many companies because for the development of products and services companies more focused on what are the user needs. This approach reduces cost as focus is made user needs.

It is very important to understand the different aspects of the web design. It would go a long way to help designing the websites in relation to the specific business requirements. You must know the business needs and accordingly design and categorize your website design. Different business needs would fit into the different web design classes.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 28th, 2010 at 7:19 am and is filed under web design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.