What is web design?
According to wikipedia : Web design is similar ( in a very simplistic way ) to traditional print publishing ( neither print ad nor design ). For me, it’s not about graphic design - it’s all about usability, accessibility, readability.
If you only want fancy graphics - you just need a print advertisement, a beautiful EDM, or just simply place a big image in the hompage. You don’t need horrible netvigation, you don’t need a disordered sitemap, you don’t even need any links!
If you only want animations - it’s just easy that you can upload your introduction video to Youtube and share it to others. If that’s not enough, you can find a flash developer converting your powerpoint to flash with great animtaion or game.
Web design is *Not* with the same definition to graphic design. I pick some points from wiki and try to explain in my very own way.
Purpose - We need to define it very clearly before everything started. It means the uses of the website, it’s all about functions to the end users. What you suppose the users / customers obtaining from your website? Â Brand image? Products specifications? Company information? We need to take exactly 1 or at most 2 of these and emphasize it. It’s definitely not a good practice if you take too much purposes just like you request Mcdonald to cook you a noodle. People who are newbies to website planning should remember that new visitors to your website is confused and should be guided.
Audience - Simply saying is the target marketing. Those visitors who are expected to view you web pages such as : age group / gender /occupations. You can imagine what content the group interested, what browsers they use, how much time they spend on internet as well as internet activities. This helps greatly defining the look ( font size, color, positioning etc ), complexity of the website.
Content - With the selected audience, we can set the  content with sequential priority and most important comes first ( for sure ). Content should be totally depends on the target group oftenly and avoid greedy for posting irrelevant content to the page’s topic - this action *Won’t* help you attracting more audience, but in contrast this will disturb end users reading and scare them away to visit again. People always messed with content, they always think graphic isn’t part of content, but how about the fact?
Layout - layout of website takes the job of displaying content clearly. Tableless design and W3C standardized is SEO-friendly and recommended but not a must; We should use tables for tabular content suitably - imagine what happen if we use all DIV to present an excel form in text browsers? We shouldn’t ignore browsers with big market share ( internet explorer 6 especially ) blindly because of meeting the w3C standard. Market first, standard second is my rule.
I hope this can help clarifying for those people who don’t know the reason they need a website ( most of the time they think they do ). We can use internet to advertise our products, our services but before that, it’s worth for us to understand its core functions and ways to make you success; Otherwise, I prefer spending my money on google adsense or get back to the old advertisement styles.
