Top Web Design Services
Welcome to MultiMedia's Web Design. We specializes in providing a range of internet services for home
builders.
We believe that the availability of a quality web site, at an
affordable cost, is not available to the small business community. It is no
secret that the major design firms charge exorbitant hourly fees to cover their
huge overhead costs which they then pass on to their clients. MultiMedia Internet
Center on the
other hand does not have this overhead cost and will not hit you with
big hourly fees... we charge a "fixed price" for our design work so
you know in advance what your upfront costs will be
Do NOT push me more than once..........PLEASE!
Web design is the
design or designing of a Web page, Website or Web application. The term
generally refers to the graphical side of Web development using images, CSS and
XHTML.
History
When the Internet was first invented, Web design consisted of
a basic
markup language that included some formatting options, and the unique ability to
link pages together using hyperlinks. It was this feature that characterized the
Web among other communication methods, and characterized Web design among other
design methods. Because of this unique behaviour of the World Wide Web, and the
unique behaviour it encouraged in users, Web design would prove to be unlike any
other form of design before or since, with the possible exception of interactive
CD-ROM design.
As the Web and Web design progressed, the markup language
used to make it, known as HTML, became more complex and flexible. Things like
tables, which could be used to display tabular information, were soon subverted
for use as invisible layout devices. With the advent of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS),
table based layout is increasingly regarded as outdated. Database integration
technologies such as server-side scripting (see PHP, ASP.NET, ASP, JSP, and
ColdFusion) and design standards like CSS further changed and enhanced the
way the Web was made.
The introduction of Macromedia Flash into an already
interactivity-ready scene has further changed the face of the Web, giving
new power to designers and media creators, and offering new interactivity
features to users.
Controversies
As in all professions, there are arguments on different ways
of doing things. These are a few of the ongoing ones.
Liquid versus fixed layouts
Programmers were the original web page designers in the early
1990s. Currently most web designers come from a
graphic artist background in print, where the artist has absolute control
over the size and dimensions of all aspects of the design. On the web however,
the Web designer has no control over several factors, especially the width of
the browser window.
Many designers compensate for this by wrapping their entire
webpage in a fixed width box, essentially limiting it to an exact pixel-perfect
value, which is a fixed layout. Some create the illusion of liquidity by
building the graphics for their webpage at a size larger than any current
standard monitor size (however, at the current rate of monitor supersizing, this
method will soon become obsolete). Other designers say that this is bad because
it ignores the preferences of the user, who might have their browser sized a
specific way that they like best. These people propose a liquid layout,
where the size of the Web page adjusts itself based on the size of the browser
window.
There is a usability reason (rather than wanting control) for
why a designer may choose a more fixed layout. Studies have shown that there is
usually an optimal line width in terms of readability. One rule to appear from
such studies is that lines should be between 40-60 characters long, or
approximately 11 words per line.
This decision of which style of layout to use is often made
on a case by case basis, depending on the needs and audience of the website.
Interesting note: Wikipedia is a liquid layout.
Flash
Macromedia Flash is a robust graphics animation/application development
program used to create and deliver dynamic content, media (such as sound and
video), and interactive applications over the web via the browser.
Many graphic artists use Flash because it gives them exact
control over every part of the design, and anything can be animated and
generally "jazzed up." Some application designers enjoy flash because it
lets them create applications that don't have to be refreshed or go to a new web
page every time an action occurs. There are many sites which forego HTML
entirely for Flash.
Flash detractors claim that Flash websites tend to be poorly
designed, and often use confusing and non-standard user-interfaces. Up until
recently, search engines have been unable to index Flash pages, which has
prevented stores from having their products easily found.
The most recent incarnation of Flash's scripting language
(called "actionscript", which is an ECMA language similar to javascript)
incorporates long-awaited usability features, such as respecting the browser's
font size and allowing blind users to use screen readers. Actionscript 2.0 is an
Object-Oriented language, allowing the use of CSS, XML, and the design of class-based web applications.
The final consensus is that Flash is simply a tool, and like
all tools it takes a skillful craftsperson to know when, and how, to use it
properly. Macromedia's other two products, Fireworks and Dreamweaver, makes
Flash integration with graphics and HTML a lot easier.
CSS versus tables
Back when
Netscape Navigator 4 dominated the browser market, the popular (but now
deprecated) solution available for designers to lay out a Web page was by using
tables. Often even simple designs for a page would require dozens of tables
nested in each other. Many web templates in Dreamweaver still use this technique today. Navigator 4 didn't support CSS
to a useful degree, so it simply wasn't used.
After the
browser wars were over, and Internet Explorer dominated the market, designers
started turning towards CSS as an alternate, better means of laying out their
pages. CSS proponents say that tables should only be used for tabular data, not
for layout. Using CSS instead of tables also returns HTML to a semantic markup,
which helps bots and search engines understand what's going on in a web page.
Today, all modern Web browsers now support CSS with different degrees of limitations.
However, one of the main points against CSS is that by
relying on it exclusively, control is essentially relinquished as each browser
has its own quirks which result in a slightly different page display. This is
especially a problem as not every browser supports the same subset of CSS codes.
For some designers used to the creating table-based layouts, developing Web
sites in CSS often becomes a matter of replicating what can be done with tables,
leading some to find CSS design rather cumbersome. For example, it has proved
rather difficult to produce certain design elements, such as vertical
positioning, and full-length footers in a design using absolute positions.
These days most modern browsers have solved most of these
quirks in CSS rendering and this has made many different CSS layouts possible.
However, people still continue to use old browsers which do not get updated any
more. Most notable among these are Internet Explorer 5 and 5.5 which, according
to some web designers, are becoming the new Netscape Navigator 4 — a block that
holds the internet back from converting to CSS design.
Dynamic web design
Concept
Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) has long been the
predominate method of structuring, stylizing, and presenting data to a web
browser. Though still the most common method of delivering data via HTTP, many
improvements have been made since its debut. Despite its usefulness for marking
up text, it does not provide many features that allow data reuse, modularity, or server-side scripting. HTML does allow for style, but there
are several other methods that are generally considered better. The collection
of all the technologies that help to overcome the static shortcomings of HTML as
a complete web design language are rolled up into the category of "dynamic web
design." Dynamic web design allows a for a web site to better interact with its
users and tailor itself to meet specific needs. In general, there are two places
that dynamic decisions are made: on the client, and on the server.
Server-side
The concept of server-side dynamic web design is simple. A
web server, running any of a myriad of web server software, makes a decision
before serving a web page to the requestor. Once the decision is made, the
server formats the HTML it is about to send according to the requestor's needs
and then sends the HTML data. The key to server-side design is that the server
makes all of the decisions and sends the client standard HTML. This helps to
ensure that all browsers, regardless of make or version, will render the page as
the web designer intended. Some common server side technologies include:
-
PHP, ASP, and JSP. All of these technologies act as the decision makers on the server.
When a user requests a web page, these technologies run their scripts and
output HTML that the client can use.
-
XSLT. Can then be used translate data in XML format to another format
such as HTML. This translation is useful as one can easily update a
translation rule to easily change the HTML structure of data.
-
mySQL. A database technology that stores a variety of data. The database
can easily have content added at any time. By doing this, a web site can be
updated by not just admins, but users who are allowed to submit data.
A popular combination is the Apache web server running PHP
and accessing data from a
mySQL database.
Client-side
The concept of client-side dynamic web design is equally
simple. With client-side technologies, a web server sends a client an HTML
document with embedded scripts. It is then up to the client software to properly
execute the scripts and produce the necessary dynamic data. One should take
caution when using client-side web design as not all browsers will interpret
scripts in the same manner. In general, client-side design is reserved for only
simple presentation attributes of a web page so that in the event a script is
misinterpreted, it is not a catestrophic failure. Some common client-side
technologies include:
-
Javascript. A very popular scripting language that allows users to
access the
document object model to directly control a web site.
-
CSS. Preferred over using HTML to stylize data, this technology allows
for control over far more style than is available in plain HTML.
Somewhere in between
An up and coming technology is
Ajax which is mostly client-side, but also allows for asynchronous
communication with the web server. This allows for web pages that are much more
application-like as they don't require a page refresh for every dynamic task.
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