The web design of your web site may seem unimportant compared to functionality or marketing, but the web design of your web site is debatable the most important part of your online business. The web design you choose to use, will not only attract a certain type of people, but also repel another. When making your web design there are three main things to keep in mind, the navigability of your web design , the look of your web design , and the overall cleanliness of your web design .

The navigability of your web design is a very important factor as to weather your web design will turn your potential customer into a customer, or a potential customer into somebody else’s customer. If your web design is confusing and your navigation links are hard to find, or misplaced, your web design will leave your viewers frustrated and lost. The most basic structure for web design layouts is using one column usually on the left hand side of the web design , with a main section to the right and a header navigation at the top. The side column of your web design should have the links to your main page usually with the links to the most important pages of your web design at the top. The header navigation of your web design should contain your main logo followed underneath by the main links of your web design underneath; links should be sorted of importance, from left to right. Then the main section of your web design can contain all of the content for your web site.

The look of your web design is very important to your customers as ugly or unprofessional colors can make people think your company is amateurish, as your web design look is seen as a direct reflection of your company. Using using bright friendly soft colors in your web design among other things your potential customers will see your company as professional and friendly. The same goes for the overall cleanliness of your web design . When your web design is cluttered and messy your potential customers will feel confused and leave.

Your web design should be as plain as you need it, meaning if your web design is small and simple, leave it that way but if your web design needs to incorporate many aspects and features, thats alright, just do it in an organized manner. For example if your web design features many pages and categories, breadcrumbs are a great way to let your viewers know where they are within your web design . Breadcrumbs are a navigation trail that lets users see the depth of the pages they are in inside your web design , here is an example of a breadcrumb navigation like you would see within a web design .

Home —> web design —> web design Tips —> web design Tutorial 1

You see the breadcrumbs above show that you where on the home page, then went into the web design category then the web design tips subcategory then the web design tutorial within that subcategory. Usually all of those would be links so that if you wanted to go to that page or category, you could click on it and go there. Techniques like the breadcrumb navigation are a good way to help your users get the most out of your web design .

As you can see web design is more then just the colors and graphics, a good web design can bring you customers and keep them coming back, while a bad web design can mean bad business for your company.

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As per Wikipedia – The Definition of web design is:

Web design is the skill of creating presentations of content (usually hypertext or hypermedia) that is delivered to an end-user through the World Wide Web, by way of a Web browser or other Web-enabled software like Internet television clients, microblogging clients and RSS readers.

The intent of web design is to create a web site—a collection of electronic files that reside on a web server/servers and present content and interactive features/interfaces to the end user in form of Web pages once requested. Such elements as text, bit-mapped images (GIFs, JPEGs) and forms can be placed on the page using HTML/XHTML/XML tags. Displaying more complex media (vector graphics, animations, videos, sounds) requires plug-ins such as Flash, QuickTime, Java run-time environment, etc. Plug-ins are also embedded into web page by using HTML/XHTML tags.

Improvements in browsers’ compliance with W3C standards prompted a widespread acceptance and usage of XHTML/XML in conjunction with Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to position and manipulate web page elements and objects. Latest standards and proposals aim at leading to browsers’ ability to deliver a wide variety of media and accessibility options to the client possibly without employing plug-ins.

Typically web pages are classified as static or dynamic:

• Static pages don’t change content and layout with every request unless a human (web master/programmer) manually updates the page. A simple HTML page is an example of static content.
• Dynamic pages adapt their content and/or appearance depending on end-user’s input/interaction or changes in the computing environment (user, time, database modifications, etc.) Content can be changed on the client side (end-user’s computer) by using client-side scripting languages (JavaScript, JScript, Actionscript, etc.) to alter DOM elements (DHTML). Dynamic content is often compiled on the server utilizing server-side scripting languages (Perl, PHP, ASP, JSP, ColdFusion, etc.). Both approaches are usually used in complex applications.

With growing specialization in the information technology field there is a strong tendency to draw a clear line between web design and web development.

web design is a kind of graphic design intended for development and styling of objects of the Internet’s information environment to provide them with high-end consumer features and aesthetic qualities. The offered definition separates web design from web programming, emphasizing the functional features of a web site, as well as positioning web design as a kind of graphic design.

• Markup languages (such as HTML, XHTML and XML)
• Style sheet languages (such as CSS and XSL)
• Client-side scripting (such as JavaScript)
• Server-side scripting (such as PHP and ASP)
• Database technologies (such as MySQL and PostgreSQL)
• Multimedia technologies (such as Flash and Silverlight)

Web pages and web sites can be static pages, or can be programmed to be dynamic pages that automatically adapt content or visual appearance depending on a variety of factors, such as input from the end-user, input from the Webmaster or changes in the computing environment (such as the site’s associated database having been modified).

With growing specialization within communication design and information technology fields, there is a strong tendency to draw a clear line between web design specifically for web pages and web development for the overall logistics of all web-based services.