Web design
It is hard to imagine the Internet without animated graphics, different styles of typography, backgrounds, videos and music.
[2] 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.
[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 any one company from monopolizing a proprietary browser and programming language, which could have altered the effect of the World Wide Web as a whole.
For example, Netscape 1.1 included tags for changing background colours and formatting text with tables on web pages.
On the whole, the browser competition did lead to many positive creations and helped web design evolve at a rapid pace.
It was also the first browser to support style sheets, which at the time was seen as an obscure authoring technique and is today an important aspect of web design.
However, designers quickly realized the potential of using HTML tables for creating complex, multi-column layouts that were otherwise not possible.
However, because Flash required a plug-in, many web developers avoided using it for fear of limiting their market share due to lack of compatibility.
Instead, designers reverted to GIF animations (if they did not forego using motion graphics altogether) and JavaScript for widgets.
But the benefits of Flash made it popular enough among specific target markets to eventually work its way to the vast majority of browsers, and powerful enough to be used to develop entire sites.
With the advancements in 3G and LTE internet coverage, a significant portion of website traffic shifted to mobile devices.
The "mobile first" approach emerged as a result, emphasizing the creation of website designs that prioritize mobile-oriented layouts first, before adapting them to larger screen dimensions.
Web designers use a variety of different tools depending on what part of the production process they are involved in.
Careful consideration might be made to ensure that the aesthetics or overall design of a site do not clash with the clarity and accuracy of the content or the ease of web navigation,[12] especially on a B2B website.
Publishing a function that doesn't work reliably is potentially worse for the user experience than making no attempt.
[note 1] This was due to considerations of screen reading devices and varying windows sizes which designers have no control over.
Although such a display may often change the relative position of major content units, sidebars may be displaced below body text rather than to the side of it.
Responsive web design is a newer approach, based on CSS3, and a deeper level of per-device specification within the page's style sheet through an enhanced use of the CSS @media rule.
Most browsers recognize a specific number of safe fonts, which designers mainly use in order to avoid complications.
However, a website target audience with a more serious or formal interest (such as business, community, or government) might find animations unnecessary and distracting if only for entertainment or decoration purposes.
The World Wide Web consortium accessibility standards require that site visitors be able to disable the animations.
It is usually manually authored, although some sites use an automated creation process, similar to a dynamic website, whose results are stored long-term as completed pages.
When dynamic web pages first developed, they were typically coded directly in languages such as Perl, PHP or ASP.
These build on top of general-purpose coding platforms and assume that a website exists to offer content according to one of several well-recognised models, such as a time-sequenced blog, a thematic magazine or news site, a wiki, or a user forum.
These tools make the implementation of such a site very easy, and a purely organizational and design-based task, without requiring any coding.
In some cases, anonymous users are allowed to edit certain web content, which is less frequent (for example, on forums - adding messages).
[21]Nielsen, Jakob; Tahir, Marie (October 2001), Homepage Usability: 50 Websites Deconstructed, New Riders Publishing, ISBN 978-0-7357-1102-0[22][23] However practitioners into the 2000s were starting to find that a growing number of website traffic was bypassing the homepage, going directly to internal content pages through search engines, e-newsletters and RSS feeds.
[29] In 2012 and 2013, carousels (also called 'sliders' and 'rotating banners') have become an extremely popular design element on homepages, often used to showcase featured or recent content in a confined space.
[30] Many practitioners argue that carousels are an ineffective design element and hurt a website's search engine optimisation and usability.
