The first website was probably published in 1991 by Tim Burners-Lee. At that point, the Internet had already been carrying email traffic and Usenet (an early online discussion system) for more than 10 years – and hypertext had been around for awhile as well, but was only used to display information on a single computer until Burners-Lee’s innovation. In the following two decades, websites went through several generations of design concepts, rapidly increasing in complexity. Here’s a brief overview of web design today.
From the technical end, several web programming languages are in use today. CSS, or Cascading Style Sheets, is used for formatting. Unfortunately, compatibility across browsers is far from perfect, so it’s important to be aware of your target audience and what browsers they are most likely to use. It’s also important to test the platform you will be using to ensure performance. Once the script is written, it must be uploaded using an FTP client to be viewable online.
The basic components of design that need to be considered are the content, the usability, appearance/aesthetic scheme, and the overall structure of the site. On virtually all sites, navigation ought to be very straightforward and intuitive.
One of the most important things is to balance between a flashy, appealing appearance and high accessibility. A site needs to stand out if it’s going to be successful, but it also needs to be usable – and the most interesting graphics and animations will definitely slow the site down. As well as striking this balance, it’s important each page of a site have a clear purpose. If you don’t know why you want your visitors to look at a given page, they probably don’t know why they’d want to look at it either. Lastly, make sure you take basic principles of search engine optimization into account when designing your page if you want to see any traffic.