Web Design Basics

Web design isn’t what it used to be. When it first began, it involved the simple display of text in a Web browser using very rudimentary HTML (hypertext markup language) that later evolved to include images, multimedia, and more. As it evolved it became more complicated, and ordinary people who did not know the first lick of HTML were interested in publishing to the Web, so the birth of the WYSIWYG HTML editor was the result. WYSIWYG stands for “what you see is what you get,” and allowed people to assemble web page elements without having to see the code behind it all. Netscape Composer, one of the popular HTML editors of the day, gradually moved from strict, code-only capabilities to incorporate some of the WYSIWYG simplicity, followed by Microsoft’s Front Page, but both of these were poorly implemented pieces of software. Front Page nearly wrecked the entire Internet with its horrid, non standards compliant code and wreckless inclusion of resource sucking java applets, most of which would only render at all if viewed using Microsoft’s Web browser, Internet Explorer, which was still fairly new at the time.-Other companies, like Adobe, took the WYSIWYG model and improved upon it, generating some actually very decent Web site design software titles like Adobe Pagemill and Go Live, which is still used today by top web designers. Unlike Microsoft Front Page, Pagemill and Go Live prided themselves on compliance with HTML standards and cross browser compatability checking features, since Internet Explorer was not the only kid on the block. This was a good thing for Web design. As the field of design continued to inspire the development of better software, design, like programming, took on an object-oriented style that made the process more streamlined and efficient.-And then, there were blogs. Blog comes from the term “web log,” and used to refer to single web pages that functioned as multi-entry journals. In the beginning of blogs, each page generated was a separate page of html, but with software like Wordpress and MovableType, even blogging became so advanced that blogs have come to resemble web pages, often so closely that the casual observer cannot tell the difference. In fact, many commercial web sites today are powered on the backend by content management systems like Droopal, Joomla, Wordpress, and MovableType, and no one even notices. Of course, it takes a designer with some real artistic skill to make these types of blogs stand out and not look like cookie cutter solutions. Still, design has come a long way since back then.