Introduction to Web Design

The word "Web Design" is an amalgamation of two words namely Web and Design. Web is short for World Wide Web which in turn is abbreviated as WWW. Design on the other hand is a broad field more than worthy of a book, a quick search on the internet will yield thousands if not millions of results depending on your search string but, it boils down to two things:

• User Interface Design (UI Design)
• User Experience Design (UX Design)

UI Design is a field of design concerned with designing user interfaces of applications, simple or complex.

UX Design is mainly concerned with designing applications for the user.

We'll discuss both topics later in the series.

The UI and UX design of an application will be useful if they are implemented using code. In the context of the web, the following technologies come to mind:

• Hypertext Markup Language (HTML)
• Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)
• JavaScript (JS)

These technologies are the three musketeers of web design and development with the recent addition of WebAssembly. HTML is used for structure, CSS is for presentation and JavaScript for behavior. We've discussed all three in this series, if you need a quick a refresher you can check out the following links:

• Introduction to HTML
• Introduction to CSS
• Introduction to JavaScript

HTML, CSS and JS combined can give us a functional web site but, we should take the following into consideration:

• Accessibility
• Usability
• Performance

Web accessibility is a broad topic and we've had books and blog post published on the topic. The theme of web accessibility is one → designing for everyone irrespective of device, network connection or web browser. We'll get into details later in the series. As an heads up you can check out the following resources:

• Understanding web accessibility
• What is web accessibility?
• The Same, But Different: Breaking Down Accessibility, Universality, and Inclusion in Design

Usability, the name should tell you what this is all about → making your web site usable. It has a really close relationship with accessibility because if your site is not accessible it reduces the chances of its usability.

Performance, don't get me started on the topic. Every developer has a personal preference for making their site fast. We won't cover performance in this series but, if you'd like to research the topic kindly check the following resources:

• Improving UX Through Front-End Performance — A List Apart
• What is web performance? — MDN

That's it for the introduction. Next, some history lesson.