HISTORY OF WEB DESIGN

Web design

Web design is a broad term covering many different skills and disciplines that are used in the production and maintenance of websites. The different areas of web design include; web graphic design, interface design, authoring; including standardised code and proprietary software, user experience design and search engine optimisation. Often many individuals will work in teams covering different aspects of the design process, although some designers will cover them all. The term web design is normally used to describe the design process relating to the front-end (client side) design of a website including writing mark up, but this is a grey area as this is also covered by web development. Web designers are expected to have an awareness of usability and if their role involves creating mark up then they are also expected to be up to date with web accessibility guidelines.

History (1988—2000)

Although web design has a fairly recent history, it can be linked to other areas such as graphic design. However web design is also seen as a technological standpoint. It has become a large part of people’s everyday lives. It is hard to imagine the Internet without animated graphics, different styles of typography, background and music.

The Start of the Web and Web Design

In 1989, whilst working at CERN Tim Berners-Lee proposed to create a global hypertext project, which later became known as the World Wide Web. Throughout 1991 to 1993 the World Wide Web was born. Text only pages could be viewed using a simple line-mode browser.[3] In 1993 Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina, created the Mosaic browser. At the time there were multiple browsers however the majority of them were Unix-based and were naturally text heavy. There had been no integrated approach to graphical design elements such as images or sounds. The Mosaic browser broke this mould.[4] The W3C was created in October 1994, to "lead the World Wide Web to its full potential by developing common protocols that promote its evolution and ensure its interoperability."[5] This discouraged and one company from monopolizing a propriety browser and programming language, which could have altered the effect of the World Wide Web as a whole. The W3C continues to set standards, which can today be seen with JavaScript. In 1994 Andreessen formed Mosaic Communications corp. That later became known as Netscape Communications the Netscape 0.9 browser. Netscape created its own HTML tags without regards to the traditional standards process. For example Netscape 1.1 included tags for changing background colours and formatting text with tables on web pages. Throughout 1996 to 1999 the browser wars began. The browser wars saw Microsoft and Netscape battle it out for the ultimate browser dominance. During this time there were many new technologies in the field, notably Cascading Style Sheets, JavaScript, and Dynamic HTML. On a whole the browser competition did lead to many positive creations and helped web design evolve at a rapid pace.[6]

Evolution of web design

In 1996, Microsoft released its first competitive browser, which was complete with its own features and tags. It was also the first browser to support style sheets, which at the time was seen as an obscure authoring technique.[6] CSS was introduced in December 1996 by the W3C to improve web accessibility and to make HTML code semantic rather than presentational. Table-based layouts became very popular as they gave web designers more options for creating websites. The HTML markup for tables was originally for displaying tabular data. However designers quickly realised the potential of what structural elements they could add to their designs. They soon created more complicated, multi-column layouts than HTML was originally capable of. However this time did see little attention been shown towards to the semantics and web accessibility. As design and good aesthetics seemed to take precedence over good mark-up structure. This period also saw spacer .GIFs become very popular for controlling the dimensions of web layouts. HTML sites were limited in their design options, even more so with earlier versions of HTML. To create complex designs, many web designers had to use complicated table structures or even use blank images for spacing.[7] However in 1996 Flash (originally known as FutureSplash) was developed. At the time it was of a very simple layout basic tools and a timeline but it enabled web designers to go beyond the point of HTML at the time. It has now progressed to be very powerful, enabling it to develop entire sites.[8]

End of the first Browser Wars

During 1998 Netscape released Netscape Communciator code under an open source licence, enabling thousands of developers to participate in improving the software. However they decided to stop and start from the beginning, which guided the development of the open source browser and soon expanded to a complete application platform. [6] 2000 was a big year for Microsoft. Internet Explorer had been released for Mac, this was significant as it was the first browser that fully supported HTML 4.01 and CSS 1, raising the bar in terms of standards compliance. It was also the first browser to fully support the PNG image format.[6] During this time Netscape was sold to AOL and this was seen as Netscape’s official loss to Microsoft in the browser wars.[6]

Tools and technologies

Web designers use a variety of different tools depending on what part of the production process they are involved in. These tools are updated over time by newer standards and software but the principles behind them remain the same. Web graphic designers use vector and raster graphics packages for creating web formatted imagery or design prototypes. Technologies used for creating websites include standardised mark up which could be hand coded or generated by WYSIWYG editing software. There is also proprietary software based on plug-ins that bypasses the client’s browsers version, these are often WYSIWYG but with the option of using the software’s scripting language. Search engine optimisation tools may be used to check search engine ranking and suggest improvements.
Other tools web designers might use include mark up validators[9] and other testing tools for usability and accessibility to ensure their web sites meet accessibility guidelines[10].

Good Practices within Web Design

Typography
Typography within websites should either be a sans serif or serif typeface focusing on either but not both types appropriate to the style of website. Designing for type in websites should also be careful the amount of typefaces used, good design will incorporate a few similar typefaces rather than a range of type faces. As websites have specific safe fonts that most users will have, designers should use these fonts as much as possible to better control a website if it breaks down. The layout of a site should incorporate; good hierarchy, good use of white space and avoid centre aligned text. This all aids to readability. [11]
Page Layout
Web pages generally should be well laid out as to help improve navigation and aid the user. This would also mean for navigation purposes the sites layout should also remain consistent on different pages. [12] When constructing sites its important to consider page width as this is vital for aligning everything that is put on your website. The most popular websites generally have a width close to 1024 pixels. Most pages are also centre aligned to look more Aesthetically pleasing on more and larger screens.[13]

Occupations

There are two primary jobs involved in creating a website: the web designer and web developer, which oft whiles work closely together on a website. [14] The web designers are responsible for the visual aspect, which include the layout, colouring and typography of a web page. A web designer will also have a working knowledge of using a variety of languages such as HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP and Flash to create a site, although the extend of their knowledge will differ from one web designer to another. Particularly in smaller organizations one person will need the necessary skills for designing and programming the full web page, whilst larger organizations may have a web designer responsible for the visual aspect alone. [15]
Further jobs, which under particular circumstances may become involved during the creation of a website include:
  • graphic designers, to create visuals for the site such as logos, layouts and buttons
  • Internet Marketing Specialists, to help maintain web presence through strategic solutions on targeting viewers to the site, by using marketing and promotional techniques on the internet.
  • SEO writers, to research and recommend the correct words to be incorporated into a particular website and make the website more accessible and found on numerous search engines.
  • Internet Copywriter, to create the written content of the page to appeal to the targeted viewers of the site. [16]
  • User Experience (UX) designer, incorporates aspects of user focused design considerations which include information architecture, user centred design, user testing, interaction design, and occasionally visual design. [17]

 

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