Web Design

lastmod 2026-02-21created 2014-02-1123 edits

Web design is the process of conceptualizing, planning, modeling, and executing the delivery of electronic media content over the Internet in a markup language format suitable for a web browser to interpret and display as a graphical user interface (GUI).

The purpose of web design is to create a website. Such a website is a collection of electronic files that resides on a web server/servers and provides content and interactive features/interfaces to end users in the form of requested web pages. Elements such as text, bitmap images (GIF, JPEG, PNG), and forms can be placed on a page using HTML/XHTML/XML tags. Displaying complex media such as vector graphics, animation, video, and sound requires separate plugins such as Flash, QuickTime, or the Java Runtime Environment. Plugins can be added to a web page using HTML/XHTML tags.

Browsers compatible with W3C standards have promoted the combination of CSS and XHTML/XML to position and use web page elements and objects. The latest standards aim to have the browser's own features deliver various media and accessibility options to the client, avoiding plugins as much as possible.

Web pages can usually be divided into static pages and dynamic pages.

Static page: Content and layout do not change with each request unless a user (webmaster/programmer) manually updates the page.
Dynamic page: Changes its appearance or content according to end-user input or changes in the computing environment (user, time, database modifications, etc.). Content can be changed on the client side by modifying DOM elements with a client-side scripting language (JavaScript, JScript, ActionScript, etc.). Dynamic content is also compiled on the server using a server-side scripting language (ColdFusion, ASP, JSP, Perl, PHP, Python, etc.).

Both approaches are usually used in complex applications.

As the fields of communication design and information and communication technology became standardized, a tendency arose to distinguish web design, specialized in web pages, from web development, which covers the complete logic of all web-based services.