Notes

Web design - The Mile-High View

Using the pace of change world wide web, it can be hard to remember that few people actually keep up with the actual flood of new technologies, frameworks, and acronyms. Unless you are generally designing for web-related companies, it's very likely that your clientele will have no idea what "building a web site" actually requires, or what happens after occur to be done designing. In this article, Lets hope to give you a very high-level overview of the Web that you can point a client to, so that they can understand what goes into a web site besides Photoshop as well as Flash.


Let's start with a little bit of history. Before any of that 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 may talk to each other. PC's arrived, and offices started hooking up a building's PCs jointly so they could talk. In that case something really revolutionary transpired: people connected one place of work network with another. Lo and behold, the basis with the Internet as we know it was blessed.


At its heart, the Internet is often a network of networks. In most cases, that smaller network will be the 1-4 computers you have with your household, which connect to the bigger "Internet" network through your router or cable modem as well as what have you. There is no "center" of the Internet, no overarching computer system directing everything; it's merely millions of small networks just like the one in your house or office connecting with one another. There are systems established to make it so that if your computer system says "Connect me along with computer XYZ, " it may find a way to make that interconnection, but those systems (think TCP/IP, routing, etc . ) are too complicated to discuss here.


So the Internet been around, but the Web as we know the idea did not. The Internet in those days seemed to be good for only a few things: email address, bulletin boards, and Usenet, among others. Then along came Tim Berners-Lee with his brief description of a new acronym: PHP. HyperText Markup Language granted the first web designers (geeky scientists) to create the first web pages. Think of HTML like formatting throughout Microsoft Word; the words you write are all there, but Term / HTML let you let them have some extra meaning. HTML helped page creators to explain their text as paragraphs, bulleted lists, numbered provides, tables of data, and more. Most of all, HTML allowed page creators to link one site to another - the "HyperText" part of the name - to ensure related documents could be observed quickly and easily.


As I mentioned before, the primary users of HTML have been geeky scientists. HTML let them format their research paperwork, and link their documents to the papers they reported by. That was about it; plain HTML doesn't have any real chance to "style" a page outside of determining what's a paragraph and is something more specialised. So the Web was a ocean of text, without even an individual image in sight.


A few years in the future, competing ideas about how to give pages some style ended up merged into a single process, CSS. "Cascading Style Sheets" let page creators create their pages prettier by simply defining how the "elements" of HTML (lists, paragraphs, and so on ) should be displayed. The actual page creator could at this point say that all text throughout paragraphs should be red, that lists should be bulleted with little squares instead of circles, and to say how tall or wide a certain article should be on the screen. Visitor makers had added this specific functionality into their programs (like Netscape Navigator or Online Explorer) for a while by this point, but CSS did some thing radical: it separated the content to be displayed from the regulations about how to display it. Using CSS, a designer could possibly write two style bedding that made very different appears to be out of a single HTML web site, without making any becomes the HTML.


And yet, despite the promise of CSS, the idea started out poorly implemented in a great many browsers, so that what searched fine in, say, Ie 3 was completely cracked in Netscape Navigator four. So , instead of CSS, numerous designers (since it was today actually possible to "design" a page! ) opted to work with HTML's table ability to construct all their content. The idea would use a website like an Excel spreadsheet - make the content and rows whatever size and height you need, and fill in each "cell" of the table with an image, or some text, until you get what you want. This led to some appealing designs, but completely along with totally broke the original tips of HTML. In a table-based design, the HTML doesn't always have any meaning at all; almost everything is just a table cell. In case the designer you are talking along with keeps telling you that "table-based design" is a bad matter, that's why. Using HTML in addition to CSS makes a site in which loads faster and that actually has some meaning to devices (like Google! ), instead of a giant spreadsheet. After all, would you ever try to make artwork or write an article within Excel?


So , we've got systems, HTML pages, and CSS stylesheets. How do they all fit together?


If someone wants a site, these people first buy a domain name. Buying a domain name gives you the right to assign the name to a particular computer system anywhere in the world, of your own choosing. A process called DNS ("Domain Brand System") informs all of the earth's connected networks of where a person pointed that name, so that when someone's computer says "Anyone know how to get to myfavoritesite. com? ", DNS know "Sure, it's at pc XYZ over there. "


Computer XYZ, meanwhile, is usually running a program called a Online server. "Server" is a nice name that scares persons, but all it really suggests is that computer XYZ is definitely sitting around listening to it is wire for anyone to say "Hey, I need the stuff regarding arborwebsolutions. com, " once it hears that, it will eventually throw that stuff within the wire. This is what people mean when they say you need to get "Web hosting" - you need to pay a company to run a pc with server software playing for your domain name, and proposing those files when anyone asks for them. You could operate your own server right inside your living room - plenty of geeks do - but that is generally more responsibility as compared to most people want to take on. Your own monthly hosting charge entails that whoever owns laptop computer is going to fix things when they break, and generally keep an eye on things for you. If they're any hosting company worth the money you shell out them, at least.


(Side take note: "Servers" aren't just for Websites. There are email servers that will sit around listening for those to say "Hey! Get this notice to Jane Doe! micron. There are file servers, normally in offices, that sit down around waiting for someone to claim "I need that presentation file from last week. " Server programs are all over the place, and every time you have a laptop or computer interaction with another personal computer, you're probably talking to any server. )


Back to often the technology. While CSS seemed to be taking shape, the Web also saw the rise of CGI, or "Common Entry Interface, " abilities. (Note that this is not the same SPECIAL as in movie special effects; gowns "Computer Generated Imagery. inch There are only so many combos of three letters out there. ) CGI allowed some sort of programmer to write a program in which sat on a Web storage space and did things more advanced than just handing someone an HTML file or a CSS sheet. With CGI, you can fill out a "form" - those collections of wording boxes that let you perform things like buy a book on Amazon or log in in order to Facebook - and do anything with that information on the web server - like telling Later on in inventory to charge your card and postal mail you a book, or consuming you to your home page about Facebook. CGI isn't a "language" in itself, it's just a system, and there are dozens of programming which have 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 get it back out as needed. While you make an account at Amazon . com, they're holding all of your account info in a database. When you log in, Amazon remembers all kinds of information about you by pulling it out of the database once more. Databases let you do more than merely accounts, though. If you've actually used blogging software similar to Wordpress, Blogger, Joomla!, or some kind of of the dozens of other weblog types out there (that consists of Facebook status updates or Twitter tweets), you've made use of a database to store your articles. All a blog site is doing is storing your current articles in the database, after which pulling out the most recent ones anytime someone comes to your website .


Consequently you've heard of fancy completely new tools like PHP, or maybe Ruby on Rails, or maybe Django? They're basically just versions on the CGI / data source idea. Sure, they're countless other complicated than that, nonetheless it gives you an idea of what their designer / developer is usually babbling about.


Yep, more or less that's all there is on the Web. I've left out the metric ton of items, but I can always come back to that later. So , after you hire a designer to produce a site from scratch, here's what these people basically doing:


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

Take all of your current content (you did provide them with your content, right? ) and mark it up in CSS;

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

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

"That's so straightforward! " some clients will explain. "I could do that myself personally! " It's true! Its not necessary a license to be a web designer, that is certainly the way it was always expected. But when most people with this way of thinking start trying to learn HTML and CSS, they end up generating nightmarish pages that set MySpace to shame. The actual tools isn't enough - you also have to know how better to apply them. Owning a sort isn't enough to make you some sort of craftsman, and hitting several nails with it once or twice will not make you a master carpenter.


One final note about Ceramic ware Dreamweaver. Dreamweaver is just a plan that helps people write CODE and CSS. That's that - the Web does not require Dreamweaver to operate; you can make a whole website in Notepad if you'd like, as long as you save the CODE file as ". html" and the CSS file since ". css". Dreamweaver really does make things a bit easier by letting you "preview" your blog as you code and sort things wherever you want in that , preview, but remember the fundamentals of HTML and CSS - text content on a single side, presentation on the other. Dreamweaver has a hard time doing in which; the sites it creates using individuals "visual tools" end up much like the spreadsheets I mentioned earlier. check here should be able to come up with a beautiful site without ever touching Dreamweaver or its ilk. That's why the design industry typically views Dreamweaver as a crutch for people who don't yet really know what they're doing.

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