Book Image

Practical Web Design

By : Philippe Hong
Book Image

Practical Web Design

By: Philippe Hong

Overview of this book

Web design is the process of creating websites. It encompasses several different aspects, including webpage layout, content production, and graphic design. This book offers you everything you need to know to build your websites. The book starts off by explaining the importance of web design and the basic design components used in website development. It'll show you insider tips to work quickly and efficiently with web technologies such as HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript, concluding with a project on creating a static site with good layout. Once you've got that locked down, we'll get our hands dirty by diving straight into learning JavaScript and JQuery, ending with a project on creating dynamic content for your website. After getting our basic website up and running with the dynamic functionalities you'll move on to building your own responsive websites using more advanced techniques such as Bootstrap. Later you will learn smart ways to add dynamic content, and modern UI techniques such as Adaptive UI and Material Design. This will help you understand important concepts such as server-side rendering and UI components. Finally we take a look at various developer tools to ease your web development process.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
Title Page
PacktPub.com
Contributers
Preface
Index

CSS – the savior


Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) became more popular in the 2000s with their increasing support in web browsers. CSS defines how the HTML is displayed, and this has allowed designers to separate the content and the design, making websites easier to maintain and quicker to load. You could change the entire look of a CSS-based website without touching the content.

CSS really made the difference as an alternative to Flash. Recommended by the W3C as a best practice, it provides a cleaner semantic, resulting in better SEO.

However, one downside of CSS was the lack of support from various browsers: one browser would support the newest feature, while another would not. It was a nightmare for developers.

We'll look into this with further details in Chapter 6, Building Your Own Website, of the book. Here are some design changes in Yahoo's website (2009):