Notes

Web design - The Mile-High View

While using pace of change on the internet, it can be hard to remember that not many people actually keep up with the actual flood of new technologies, frameworks, and acronyms. Unless you are usually designing for web-related businesses, it's very likely that your buyers will have no idea what "building a web site" actually requires, or what happens after occur to be done designing. In this article, I really hope to give you a very high-level summary of the Web that you can point a customer to, so that they can understand what retreats into a web site besides Photoshop or perhaps Flash.


Let's start with a bit of history. Before any of this particular Web malarkey came about, you experienced computer networks. That is to say, folks connected individual mainframes (because personal computers didn't exist yet) with cables so they could talk to each other. PC's arrived, and offices started hooking up a building's PCs collectively so they could talk. And then something really revolutionary happened: people connected one place of work network with another. Lo and behold, the basis on the Internet as we know it was born.


At its heart, the Internet is a network of networks. Typically, that smaller network may be the 1-4 computers you have within your household, which connect to the more expensive "Internet" network through your router or cable modem or what have you. There is no "center" on the Internet, no overarching computer system directing everything; it's merely millions of small networks just like the one in your house or office joining with one another. There are systems set up to make it so that if your pc says "Connect me having computer XYZ, " it could find a way to make that relationship, but those systems (think TCP/IP, routing, etc . ) are too complicated to express here.


So the Internet endured, but the Web as we know the item did not. The Internet in those days was good for only a few things: e-mail, bulletin boards, and Usenet, among others. Then along followed Tim Berners-Lee with his description of a new acronym: HTML. HyperText Markup Language allowed the first web designers (geeky scientists) to create the first web pages. Think of HTML like formatting throughout Microsoft Word; the words jots down are all there, but Concept / HTML let you let them have some extra meaning. HTML granted page creators to explain their text as paragraphs, bulleted lists, numbered provides, tables of data, and more. Just remember, HTML allowed page makers to link one page to another - the "HyperText" part of the name - in order that related documents could be located quickly and easily.


As I mentioned before, the initial users of HTML ended up geeky scientists. HTML let them format their research papers, and link their papers to the papers they reported. That was about it; plain HTML doesn't have any real ability to "style" a page outside of figuring out what's a paragraph and is something more specialised. So the Web was a coastal of text, without even there are image in sight.


A few years later on, competing ideas about how to supply pages some style were being merged into a single technique, CSS. "Cascading Style Sheets" let page creators produce their pages prettier simply by defining how the "elements" associated with HTML (lists, paragraphs, and so forth ) should be displayed. Often the page creator could currently say that all text in paragraphs should be red, that will lists should be bulleted together with little squares instead of circles, and to say how taller or wide a certain article or post should be on the screen. Web browser makers had added this functionality into their programs (like Netscape Navigator or Web Explorer) for a while by this position, but CSS did something radical: it separated a few possibilities to be displayed from the policies about how to display it. Using CSS, a designer may write two style pillows and comforters that made very different appears to be out of a single HTML site, without making any changes to the HTML.


And yet, rapidly promise of CSS, the item started out poorly implemented in a great many browsers, so that what appeared fine in, say, Web browser 3 was completely damaged in Netscape Navigator several. So , instead of CSS, many designers (since it was at this point actually possible to "design" a page! ) opted to utilize HTML's table ability to design all their content. The idea was to use a website like an Shine spreadsheet - make the posts and rows whatever girth and height you need, and fill in each "cell" of the table with an image, or something text, until you get what you wish. This led to some attractive designs, but completely and totally broke the original tips of HTML. In a table-based design, the HTML noesn't need any meaning at all; everything is just a table cell. When the designer you are talking along with keeps telling you that "table-based design" is a bad factor, that's why. Using HTML along with CSS makes a site in which loads faster and that actually has some meaning to equipment (like Google! ), instead of a giant spreadsheet. After all, could you ever try to make a muslim or write an article with Excel?


So , we've got networks, HTML pages, and CSS stylesheets. How do they all aligned?


If someone wants a site, they first buy a domain name. Choosing a domain name gives you the right to assign the name to a particular computer anywhere in the world, of your own choosing. A method called DNS ("Domain Brand System") informs all of the world's connected networks of where anyone pointed that name, to ensure that when someone's computer affirms "Anyone know how to get to myfavoritesite. com? ", DNS know "Sure, it's at computer system XYZ over there. inch


Computer XYZ, meanwhile, is usually running a program called a Web server. "Server" is a expensive name that scares folks, but all it really means is that computer XYZ is usually sitting around listening to it is wire for anyone to say "Hey, I need the stuff intended for arborwebsolutions. com, " and as soon as it hears that, it will throw that stuff covering the wire. This is what people indicate when they say you need to buy "Web hosting" - you have to pay a company to run a pc with server software being attentive for your domain name, and offering those files when somebody asks for them. You could manage your own server right within your living room - plenty of geeks do - but that's generally more responsibility when compared with most people want to take on. Your current monthly hosting charge also means that whoever owns your computer is going to fix things once they break, and generally keep an eye on things for you. If Froala Editor Free 're a new hosting company worth the money you spend them, at least.


(Side take note: "Servers" aren't just for Web sites. There are email servers in which sit around listening for folks to say "Hey! Get this page to Jane Doe! micron. There are file servers, generally in offices, that remain around waiting for someone to declare "I need that appearance file from last week. inch Server programs are almost everywhere, and every time you have a pc interaction with another computer system, you're probably talking to a server. )


Back to typically the technology. While CSS was taking shape, the Web also saw the rise of CGI, or "Common Trip Interface, " abilities. (Note that this is not the same SPECIAL as in movie special effects; which is "Computer Generated Imagery. inches There are only so many combinations of three letters on the market. ) CGI allowed the programmer to write a program in which sat on a Web hardware and did things more complicated than just handing someone the HTML file or a CSS sheet. With CGI, you might fill out a "form" rapid those collections of textual content boxes that let you do things like buy a book about Amazon or log in in order to Facebook - and do one thing with that information on the server - like telling Joe in inventory to charge your card and deliver you a book, or using you to your home page on Facebook. CGI isn't a "language" in itself, it's just a technique, and there are dozens of programming languages that can talk CGI.


Hand in hand with CGI is the using databases. Databases let some sort of server hold on to the information putting in those forms, in addition to CGI can either store info into the database or obtain it back out as needed. While you make an account at Amazon . com, they're holding all of your profile info in a database. When you log in, Amazon remembers a variety of information about you by tugging it out of the database again. Databases let you do more than simply accounts, though. If you've actually used blogging software like Wordpress, Blogger, Joomla!, or any of the dozens of other blog site types out there (that involves Facebook status updates or even Twitter tweets), you've utilized a database to store your personal articles. All a blog site is doing is storing your personal articles in the database, and then pulling out the most recent ones anytime someone comes to your website.


Therefore you've heard of fancy fresh tools like PHP, or maybe Ruby on Rails, or perhaps Django? They're basically just different versions on the CGI / repository idea. Sure, they're far more complicated than that, nonetheless it gives you an idea of what their designer / developer is definitely babbling about.


Yep, about that's all there is on the Web. I've left out any metric ton of items, but I can always come back to that later. So , whenever you hire a designer to generate a site from scratch, here's what they may basically doing:


Find an appropriate domain name and buy it (a challenge in its own right), and point it on the hosting server;

Take your entire content (you did give them your content, right? ) as well as mark it up in PHP;

Write CSS stylesheets that will turn that content in to a nice-looking website;

Figure out virtually any CGI / database issues that need to be done, and set these up (usually called "back-end" work).

"That's so simple! " some clients will say to you. "I could do that myself! " It's true! You don't need a license to be a web designer, and that is the way it was always expected. But when most people with this frame of mind start trying to learn HTML along with CSS, they end up producing nightmarish pages that fit MySpace to shame. Knowing the tools isn't enough -- you also have to know how better to apply them. Owning a sort isn't enough to make you a craftsman, and hitting some nails with it once or twice won't make you a master contractor.


One final note about Brick Dreamweaver. Dreamweaver is just a course that helps people write CSS and CSS. That's this - the Web does not need Dreamweaver to operate; you can make a whole website in Notepad if you need, as long as you save the HTML PAGE file as ". html" and the CSS file seeing that ". css". Dreamweaver can make things a bit much easier by letting you "preview" your site as you code and variety things wherever you want because preview, but remember the skin foundations of HTML and CSS - text content on one side, presentation on the other. Dreamweaver has a hard time doing in which; the sites it creates using people "visual tools" end up just like the spreadsheets I mentioned prior. Any good designer should be able to generate a beautiful site without ever pressing Dreamweaver or its ilk. That's why the design industry generally views Dreamweaver as a crutch for people who don't yet know what they're doing.

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