Web Design Fort Walton Beach FL

Since the invention of the World Wide Web in 1990 by Tim Berners-Lee the web has grown apace, as has the field of web design and development. In the beginning, web design was the preserve of the academic community and information technology profession. It was soon adopted by amateurs who taught themselves web site design skills and helped to drive forward the personal computing revolution.

Internet service providers, the companies who provide access to the Internet, realized this and started to provide space on the web to their customers in which they could place their web page design and content for the connected world to see.

The early World Wide Web community did not welcome commercial use of the web and web design technology, but companies soon grasped the potential of web design and development to improve their business. These days, custom web design is big business and web design and development is ubiquitous in the commercial, government and social spheres.

The buzz on the World Wide Web today is about Web 2.0. This encompasses a whole raft of new web design and development technologies. These include blogging (essentially public diary-keeping), news feeds (that bring the web to you), social networking (online communities) and AJAX (seamless changing of content in the web browser window). Even advertising is informing custom web design with companies like Google, Amazon, Yahoo and many others making it easy to incorporate paid advertising into web page design. Web site design has never been healthier or more diverse.

The easiest way to get into web design is to use web authoring software. This kind of software uses WYSIWYG (“what you see is what you get”) interfaces so you can create web page design layouts graphically rather than writing code directly in text. Most of this software also allows you to tweak the code if you have the skill and the inclination.

Many such authoring packages provide templates for web site designs, making web design and development quick and easy even for novices, provided that they have some experience in using applications in a graphical user interface such as the windowing systems provided by all modern operating systems. The power of professional web software packages means that they can produce custom web design solutions as well as web design and development in standard structures.

For those who prefer to work within the Microsoft environment, their web page editor may be the right choice for web site design and is a mid priced solution. Other web developers with a preference for Apple Macs might favor the Adobe software suite, including their authoring, photo editing and illustration software. This makes for a heavyweight all-in-one solution with a price tag to match for the seasoned custom web design practitioner. This comprehensive approach to web site design is also taken by Macromedia's package which features their web editing, animation and graphics products.

There are also open source web authoring programs that are essentially free. One of these is Nvu (pronounced N-view) which, whilst lacking a graphics editor, can be used for web site design regardless of whether the user has knowledge of coding. It can also be used to add web page designs to a website using FTP (File Transfer Protocol).

HTML stands for Hyper Text Markup Language and is the foundation of almost all websites and therefore of web site design. It was designed to provide the structure and content of web pages and evolved to support the display of colors, fonts, layouts and other purely stylistic and visual elements.

The code for a HTML document looks like plain language interspersed with odd symbol, letter and number combinations. These are the tags that turn the plain text into a web page design. Tags act like brackets around text and are either opening tags or closing tags. Each tag begins with a 'less than' symbol, is followed by letters indicating how the following text is to be displayed or treated, and ends with a 'greater than' symbol which is preceded by a 'forward slash' if it is a closing tag.

There are tags for many elements of a document, including headings, paragraphs, tables and hyperlinks, the essential feature in all web site design and how the web works. There are several other markup languages related to HTML which use other tags but work in a similar way to achieve specialist and custom web design.

The modern companion to HTML is CSS, which stands for Cascading Style Sheets. This handles the layout and appearance aspects of web design and development in a more flexible and efficient way than can be achieved by HTML. CSS can be integrated into HTML tags but is best used by adding references to CSS 'classes' in those tags to refer to 'properties' elsewhere in the web page design or, preferably, an entirely separate file. Changes to the style and layout across a web site design can be achieved by modifying a single file rather than every single page individually. This has benefits for the speed of web design and development.