What is web design?

Web design is the skill of creating presentations of content (usually hypertext or hypermedia) that is delivered to an end-user through the World Wide Web, by way of a Web browser or other Web-enabled software like Internet television clients, microblogging clients and RSS readers. Web design is a kind of graphic design intended for development and styling of objects of the Internet's information environment to provide them with high-end consumer features and aesthetic qualities.

 

Web design has come a long way in the past 5 years alone. Every day, as more and more business engage their online presence, web designers such as ourselves are always developing ways to increase our clients online traffic, and conversion ratios. It has never been more essential to make sure your website validate.

 

What is validation?

Validation is a way to ensure that your website is using the most up-to-date methods of design. It is governed by the World Wide Web Consortium (or w3c) - Web site validation is a must! Having a correctly validated web design can help cross-browser compatibility. Meaning your website will look the same in all web browsers. It can also help towards search engine optimisation, which is a way of optimising your web site for search engines such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo, helping them "read" your website. The more search engine friendly your web site is, the better! The Carter Group will ensure that your website is validated completely! So, why do we validate, and what can validation be used for?

 

Validation as a debugging tool

While contemporary Web browsers do an increasingly good job of parsing even the worst HTML “tag soup”, some errors are not always caught gracefully. Very often, different software on different platforms will not handle errors in a similar fashion, making it extremely difficult to apply style or layout consistently.

 

Using standard, interoperable markup and stylesheets, on the other hand, offers a much greater chance of having one's page handled consistently across platforms and user-agents. Indeed, most developers creating rich Web applications know that reliable scripting needs the document to be parsed by User-Agents without any unexpected error, and will make sure that their markup and CSS is validated before creating a rich interactive layer.

 

When surveyed, a large majority of Web professionals will state that validation errors is the first thing they will check whenever they run into a Web styling or scripting bug.

 

Validation as a future-proof quality check

Checking that a page “displays fine” in several contemporary browsers may be a reasonable insurance that the page will “work” today, but it does not guarantee that it will work tomorrow.

 

In the past, many authors who relied on the quirks of Netscape 1.1 suddenly found their pages appeared totally blank in Netscape 2.0. Whilst Internet Explorer initially set out to be bug-compatible with Netscape, it too has moved towards standards compliance in later releases.

 

Validation is one of the simplest ways to check whether a page is built in accordance with Web standards, and provides one of the most reliable guarantee that future Web platforms will handle it as designed.

 

Scripting and online application development.

When the Internet first came into being, many of the websites you would come across were "static", meaning their pages were designed, then uploaded, and when a change was to be made, the web designer would update their local copy, and re-upload it. Today, as the Internet is used for applications and online stores, we use "scripting" to dynamically update content within a website.

 

Web sites now use a variety of scripting languages, including PHP, ASP, CFML and many more. All of these languages are different, but they all possess one uniformity. To allow website content to be updated dynamically, depending on certian conditions. You come across scripted web sites every day. From your favourite social network, to online stores, and online news/media.

 

The Carter Group have many years experience in developing web based applications, and dynamically driven web sites using PHP and backend databases such as MySQL. Rest assured that The Carter Group can create professional, powerful applications for your business, that are both robust, and affordable!