Developing a website involves taking into account a multitude of factors. From initial client meetings gathering site requirements, incorporating usability factors and interface design to the actual implementation and the technologies used to host and code the project.
All websites across the world are designed using the same mark-up language- HTML. Hypertext mark-up language allows web designers to create structure to websites where images, buttons, headers and text can be added. The structure, images and buttons are styled using CSS. Cascading style sheets allow designers to semantically state the presentation of the HTML that makes up a webpage.
There are a multitude of HTML tags and CSS attributes at a designers disposal allowing for all manner of designs to be taken from a Photoshop PSD file to a fully functional website.
Upon page load, the HTML and CSS is rendered by the web browser on the client machine. The HTML and CSS should be written in a valid format. Failure to comply with validation rules can result in all manner of website design issues, from images not displaying correctly to entire items of content on the website being masked by other elements meaning the website is seen by visitors and instantly regarded as poor- meaning that the website bounce rate is astronomical. Studies have shown that web designers have 3-5 seconds to get the visitors interest and keep it – this must always be kept in mind when designing websites.
To check for validation issues, there are free tools available online that allow you to either upload your HTML and CSS files or simply provide the URL for an automated checker to verify.
Once a designer has followed the validation guidelines to ensure that their code it syntactically correct, it is then time to pass the design to the web developer who will add the required functionality to the project. The functionality can be implemented using any scripting language from PHP to ASP.NET depending on hosting configuration to be used.
Web design mark-up languages