Website Design Portfolio

Web design has grown to be an essential requirement for both companies to promote their product range and services and also individuals that want to provide an insight into their interests or family life.

As the field of web design has grown over the years so too has the various options and platforms available. Each individual website will have its own requirement, will be built to serve its own purpose and function in its own unique way.

HTML web design is perhaps one of the more basic yet easily implemented web design platforms available.

The introduction of basic HTML web design college courses, home study and off the shelf learning has made HTML web design a readily available products for anyone to explore and utilise.

As with anything in life, HTML web design does unfortunately have its flaws. A HTML web design can be easily constructed, but in the same breath can be complicated to maintain and amend depending on the knowledge one has available to them.

Many web design companies actually benefit a lot more from HTML web design projects as constant changes and site amends may at some point be required by the client, and of course these come at a price to the client.

More sophisticated and easily managed web design platforms can be utilised such as dynamic driven web designs in a range of languages such as ASP, PHP, ColdFusion, .NET and more to just name a few, however the costing would be considerably greater than that of a HTML web design.

For a basic website for a small company or an individual, perhaps it is wise to go for HTML web design as generally cost implications would be cheaper and in some cases will provide the requirement needed for the design.

ASP.NET is a Microsoft platform and is run on Windows Servers such as Windows 2000 Server. ASP.NET allows websites built on this platform to be database driven, which allows a Content Management System (CMS) to be built. This in turn enables the website owner to make live changes to their website using a secure admin area. An example of this would be a shopping cart where the prices change regularly. All that is required for the site to be updated would be a simple login to the admin area of the site. From here any prices or images could be updated, added or deleted. Any changes here would be visible on the website immediately. Another advantage of using a database driven website is all the content can be searched. This is not possible on sites that are not database driven. ASP.NET can be coded in either VB or C#, both of which are very popular languages that can be found in other application based software. Many other Microsoft applications use Visual Basic (VB) such as Microsoft Access, in the form of VBA (Visual Basic for Applications). All ASP.NET pages have the .aspx extension which replaces the older but still popular .asp page extension used in Classic ASP.

PHP originally stood for 'personal home page' and was developed by Rasmus Lerdorf to replace perl scripts. PHP has evolved into a server side scripting language that is especially suited for dynamic web site development. PHP code is executed by the PHP runtime typically to create dynamic website content often from a database. PHP works in a very similar way to rival technologies such as Microsoft's Active Server Pages, Sun Microsystems’s Java Server Pages, and mod_perl.

The LAMP and WAMP architectures have become popular in the web industry as a way of deploying web applications. PHP is commonly used as the P in this bundle alongside Linux, Apache and MySQL, although the P may also refer to Python or Perl.

Weblinx has had great success developing dynamic web sites in PHP. There are many frameworks that help provide a design structure to promote rapid application development. Bespoke graphic user interfaces for use with content management systems are commonplace when Weblinx design dynamic web sites both for customers and internally.

PHP is typically run on Linux servers using Apache web server. mySQL is often the database platform of preference when using PHP to develop dynamic websites mainly because of the seamless integration with PHP but also the licensing benefits in comparison to it's competitors.

mod_php is the most popular module for Apache web server, as of April 2007 over 20 million internet domains were hosted on server with PHP installed. Significant websites are written in PHP including the user-facing portion of Facebook, Wikipedia, Yahoo!, MyYearbook, Digg, Joomla, WordPress, YouTube in its early stages, Drupal and Tagged.

CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheet, It is used to develop the look and feel of the content within a website. The advantages of using css are as followed;

Less coding

Less coding is used because elements in the website are controlled by one single class rather than many inline style.

Easy maintenance

With all the styles within one place on a website any changes that need to be made weather it be colour, fonts or positioning of objects, can be done with ease. For example if the colour and font size of all the H1 headers of a site need to be changed all the designer/developer needs to do is change a few lines of code within the css style sheet rather than having to find all the h1 header in the site and manually adjusting the inline style that sits along side of them.

Higher content to code ( tag ) ratio

With all the style codes removed from the html coding of the webpage and moved to an external style sheet, it presents a higher content to code ratio to the search engines and allows the spiders to read the important information of a site much easier.

Fast download of pages.

Once a browser cache the css style sheet of a website the loading time of each page becomes faster because the on page style classes are not loaded from the server each time a page loads up.

Flexibility in defining style.

With cascading style sheets more than one style can be given to an element. Priority is given to local styles first so that any global styling is overridden by styles that are declared on page or inline with the elements.

Graphic design makes all the difference on search engines. You need the right look and feel to get your website interactive and convert clicks to sales for your business. A good design, either web or graphic design should look closely at the main principles of search engine optimisation so that traffic is directed to and also held to a website.

When developing a website the end user should always be kept in mind. The visitor does not like to wait for a site to load therefore graphics must be saved in a way that they do not take too long to load up.

Designing a website does not always involve clever use of graphics and big impacting flash banners that stun the users, it is often about creating simple and 'ease of use' designs that allow visitors to easily navigate around the site without finding it frustrating and difficult. A good website design is a balance between elegance and ease of use.

A well thought out website design is not much use if no one sees it, that is why the implementation of SEO techniques should be taken into account. When a design is created the correct use of image tags, meta tags, keywords and description are essential. To strengthen the site even more alt tags and title tags should be added to all images.

Over all a good thought out website design with attractive graphics and SEO implementation will lead to more traffic through your site, more conversions and increased earnings.