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"Luminous Art & Design :: Art & Artists"
Web Design :: Biography and Books"
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Web design is the arrangement and creation of content shown on the Internet in the form of websites. The basic design of pages on the Web use HTML (HyperText Markup Language) to create documents displayed on the World Wide Web.
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Web design is the arrangement and creation of content shown on the Internet in the form of websites. The basic design of pages on the Web use HTML (HyperText Markup Language), the software coding language used to create documents displayed on the World Wide Web.
The Internet was developed for US military and already in place in the 1960s, and soon used by academia in Universities. In the 1980s, the developments on World Wide Web started at CERN, a high energy physics research facility in Switzerland. Tim Berners-Lee did the initial development by working on the standard html and browser programs. He also published the first website in 1991, which made him the first web designer in the world. It was not until 1993 that the first freeware browser versions for Macintosh and Windows were developed and WWW started to spread with 500 web servers at the end of the year. One year later, the web had 10 million users and more than 10,000 servers.
In the start, websites were written in very basic HTML. These sites usually had edge to edge text that ran for the full page with blank lines for segmentations. As web design developed the HTML became more flexible, but also more complex with features like tables that were (mis)used as layout devices. With the introduction of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and Adobe Flash, the face of the web changed.
In the early 1990 the web designers were mostly programmers. Now, with the developments of the web, most websites are created by graphic artists, that have knowledge in Photoshop and Flash. Small web designs are usually carried out by a single individual that is skilled in many or aspects of web design; the webmaster. Large projects can be created by a group of people with specialized skills under supervision of a project manager. Then the graphic artists pay attention to the esthetics and professional appearance of a page or a whole site and search engine optimization (SEO) consultants work on the textual side of the website and focus on the visibility, accessibility and informational value of the site.
When a website is completed, an FTP program is used to upload (publish) the site and make it available to the public on the internet. Once published, the webmaster or SEO consultant uses different techniques to generate traffic to the site. A good designed website has relevant content and information, is user-friendly, simple to navigate, consistent in style, easy to find on the internet, and listed on most search engines.
Traditionally designed websites with HTML are static. This means that when a website is requested by clicking on a URL, the server returns the HTML document and the browser displays it. With a dynamic site, the user can make a request for information stored in a database. The server finds the information and assemble it ‘on the fly’. The content is displayed in the same template for each page of the site. Designing a dynamic website requires understanding of the database and knowledge of programming and scripting.
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