Web design encompasses a variety of disciplines and skills in the creation and maintenance of online sites. These areas include web development; website template and layout; website content and typography; website user experience; and website marketing. A website is said to be “good” if it creates an impact on its users, inspires them to take positive action, and makes an impression on the marketplace. The impact is determined by how well the website meets the needs and requirements of the viewer and how effectively it expresses the message that the designer has conveyed through the website design.
There are several techniques used in website design. The design techniques may be based on traditional design methods like Adobe Flash, CSS, Java, and Flash. There are also new methods, which are more flexible in terms of the implementation and the effect they have on the end-users. Adaptive website design, for example, makes use of screen sizes websites in a manner that makes it possible for people viewing the website to be able to access it easily regardless of their monitor size or browser type.
Adaptive website design ensures that websites work best with screen sizes of various formats. This is because many people view web pages differently. People viewing web pages on mobile phones can have difficulty reading some elements of websites designed for PCs. It is for this reason that some websites are designed for mobile phone users in portrait mode and others are designed for viewing on their monitor. Responsive websites work best on devices that have a wider screen size.
In website design, the navigation and the appearance of the site are given great importance. A good website design must make the user experience satisfactory. Therefore, it is imperative to ensure that the site contains all the necessary links and functionalities that ensure easy navigation. For instance, a website works well if it contains contact information such as a telephone number, a physical address, and an e-mail address.
People who are using screen-scraping software applications to obtain information from a website design will not be able to read the contact information if the website does not contain navigational links. If the website does not contain links, then the visitor may well be frustrated and will not go through the entire website. For this reason, most people consider responsive websites to be more beneficial than adaptive ones. A website that is responsive and adaptive enables the viewer of the website to easily change the displayed content as well as the contact information displayed on the website. Consequently, adaptive websites work best when the right criteria are used in order to design them.
Another factor that goes into the design of websites is the usability. A website design that is considered to be highly usable has the potential of attracting more viewers. More viewers mean more traffic. More traffic means more potential customers.
The quality of the design and its development is dependent on the target audience of the website. If the target audience of the website is predominantly women, then the website design and development team should focus on the user experience and design for female viewers. The primary aim of any web development team is to make the website design and development-friendly to the widest range of audiences possible. A team that is mostly made up of men tends to have a very masculine perspective and tends to downplay the importance of the user experience and the cross-browser compatibility of the website.
One aspect that many website designs and development teams do not pay enough attention to is the color scheme. The color scheme must be such that it allows the visitors of the website to have a good color vision. They should be able to understand the visual elements displayed on the website easily. To achieve this, web developers and designers often use color schemes that are either too light or dark.