Web Design

Joel Long

English IV N2

January 24, 2008

Mrs. Garrett

Exposition

Web design is a new market, growing quickly. It was started back in August of 1991 by Tim Berners-Lee, who posted the first website. Berners-Lee used hypertext, which had been around for decades, and made it into markup language. Today the most popular code is HTML (hyper text markup language) is used to create websites. After Berners-Lee invented this language, many other forms of this language such as XHTML and other languages such as CSS (cascading style sheets) were developed. Berners-Lee took this idea from a program that the military used in 1951 to communicate across the waters to Korea. That was a simple program, much like instant messenger today, but was done with a giant machine. Only one end received words; the other end just received Morse code. That did eventually evolve into what it is today, as the Internet. The Internet today is used more for personal gain then anything. Almost all businesses need a website to market their services/products. In today’s society, a website is necessary, which means that someone to make and run that website is equally necessary. To better understand web design, it is important to explore stunning design, a relevant purpose, and the flourishing market.

In order to attract people’s attention, and make your site irresistible one must have a great layout and marvelous design. In order to do that, HTML is essential to learn. Matt Robison, a web designer who has posted tips on his website, says, “The Hyper Text Mark-up Language is a method of describing the structure of a document to a kind of program called a web browser. You type in your content, then you mark up sections of it as being headers, paragraphs, etc. Then you add your images and tables, just like a Word document” (Robinson 1). HTML is the essential to any type of web design; when using any type of code it will always have a base of HTML. As for the actual design of the site, you have to make it appealing for its purpose. While designing you have to think about who is going to be looking at this site, what are you trying to accomplish, and how your going to make it the way the customer wants it. The design of the site is equally, if not more important than the content of the site. If the site has amazing content but doesn’t grab the readers’ attention then they are not even going to read the information anyway. At the same time if the site is meant to be looked at by a person in college but is built like a site for a five year old, then the college kid’s probably not going to want to look at the site. The look and feel of your site is what determines these parameters your trying to meet. Make your site look like something a college kid will go to, and more college kids will use this site for its desired purpose. This, however parameters to this as well the site will also have to fit the parameters of the customer. The person paying for the site to be made is always the person to please. Learning this would be one of the most important things to learn as a web designer.

When thinking of design the next thing to think about is interaction and accessibility. When going to a site people expect it to be easy to navigate around, and easy to use. The most annoying things about a lot of sites out there, is going to one and then not being about to find the information it says it has. Websites need to be easy to navigate around for good accessibility. When writing about web myths, diveintomark.org says, “virtually all accessibility guidelines are about adding, not subtracting. Have an image? Add alternate text. Have navigation? Add a skip link. Have those wacky dynamic Javascript menus? Add regular text links. Whatever kind of exciting stuff you have now, keep it, but add this too” (Myths1). Make things easy to find or adding a search to the site is a great way to do that. The best way to make the person viewing the site like it a lot is to add interaction, Moving objects, bright colors, and media are great ways to make the site more interactive and more appealing to the people using it. Design is a great ability to be blessed with, but without a purpose it is worthless.

When creating a website, before you pick up a computer, you need to site down with the customer, which may just be you yourself, and think what is this website going to accomplish. There are several different things that a site could accomplish. Dr. Ralph F. Wilson, of Web Marketing Today says:

Create an online brochure that will help potential clients, customers, and partners learn about your company and look at it in a favorable light. You're trying to enhance your brand or organization image. I've