Web Design Software

Web Design involves conceptualising, planning, modelling and the execution of electronic media content via the Internet. This is delivered through the mark-up language (that codes the page) and various designs and images that make the content more appealing to the sites visitors. Because the process in multifaceted, web designers have a number of tools in their repertoire. Internet design is a general term to describe a number of skilled tasks – graphic design, layout planning, coding & implementation of the design, testing and publication.

Web designers have a number of different areas to focus upon:

• The content: Since ‘content is king’, having high quality, useful content will ensure visitors come to the site, return time again, and that the search engines will rank the site highly.

• The usability: This stage means making sure the site is easy to navigate and will perform uniformly, unaffected by the users browser or operating system. Good sites should also be able to load quickly even on a dial-up connection (sometimes this involves having a broadband and a narrowband version of each page).

• The appearance: Making sure the site is aesthetically pleasing will enhance the visitors experience, and may make them more likely to return. Certainly, a poor and unattractive design that detracts from the content will make visitors more unlikely to return.

• The visibility of the site: Ensuring that the site has high quality content, is user friendly and visually appealing is not enough. The webmaster also has to ensure that visitors can find the site. This means using SEO (search engine optimisation) techniques to ensure that the site can be found easily by the big search engines. Programs like Macromedia/Adobe’s Dreamweaver, allows the webmaster to optimise the site easily. Specific SEO packages like ‘TurboPerformer’ are also available for this purpose, see turbopromoter.com for more information and an overview of features.

Macromedia’s Dreamweaver is a popular tool for designing webpage layouts and to automate the coding process. It is also able to code CSS (cascading style sheets), a feature which negates the requisite for tables, making the site load more quickly. This also ensures that the site is cross-browser compliant. Professional web designers like Dreamweaver because the program allows the designer to easily switch between WYSIWYG view to code view, so that changes can be made in the code and previewed in the WYSIWYG viewer, or vice-versa. Text that is imported from word processors (like Microsoft Word etc.) can be inserted with the original styling retained (or added to the CSS file) to expedite the working process.

Adobe Photoshop is the other predominant application used by web designers. This package allows for high-quality images to be created or composed, then saved in a web-friendly format (ensuring quality is sufficient for on-screen viewing, whilst cutting file size as much as possible). Some designers also design the entire site layout using Photoshop, and then use various techniques to code the XHTML (Extensible HyperText Markup Language) and CSS from the PSD (Photoshop Document). This allows creative individuals to focus upon the design and usability of the site, then for coding experts to convert this design into a usable page.