Web Design Explained

The web design field includes 3 areas of expertise that require unique sets of skills. Design, client side programming, and server side programming are the 3 main areas of expertise necessary to accomplish anything good in the web design field – and they are very different in nature.

If you’re working on a web design & development project, or looking for a team to work with you, this is something that is absolutely crucial to understand.

Design

That means creating the visual representation for whatever information you want to communicate to your users. There are many ways to go about this – some designers use Photoshop or other software and create the entire representation before coding it into a web page. Some use good old pencil and paper and skip Photoshop, going directly into coding.

In all cases, designing for the web is fundamentally different than pure graphic design. When designing for the web, you have to design while combines skills from user interface design, marketing oriented design, design based on conversions knowledge and understanding, web programming constraints and possibilities, browser compatibility issues, screen resolution distribution, color management distribution, and much more! Of course, “normal” graphic design skills also play their part including branding, identity, color scheme, etc…

Client Side Programming

Client side programming technologies inlcude HTML, CSS, Flash, and JavaScript. Your internet browser will read the code in these technologies to display the web page, including interactivity effects, etc… Since different browsers interpret code differently, a web designer has to take all major browser into account when coding a web page. It’s often not as easy as it sounds!

Server Side Programming

That’s the programming involved to perform calculations and requests on the server. The most widely used open source server side technologies are PHP and MySQL (for database stuff). Many server side frameworks have been written by web developers – these frameworks include pre-written code (classes) so that when developing an application you can use these built-in classes instead of having to write everything from scratch every time.

In short

In most cases, when you enter a URL in your browser address bar, you are basically making a call to a server – that server makes whatever calculation is needed by the application and returns some values. Those values are rendered by the browser based on the visual representation that the HTML/CSS dictates.