Multidisciplinary requirements:

Issues: As in collaborative designs, there are conflicts between differing goals and methods of web site designs. These are a few of the ongoing ones.

1. Lack of collaboration in designIn the early stages of the web, there wasn’t as much collaboration between web designing and larger advertising campaigns, customer transactions, social networking, intranets and extranets as there is now. Web pages were mainly static online brochures disconnected from the larger projects. Many web pages are still disconnected from larger projects. Special design considerations are necessary for use within these larger projects. These design considerations are often overlooked, especially in cases where there is a lack of leadership, lack of understanding of why and technical knowledge of how to integrate, or lack of concern for the larger project in order to facilitate collaboration. This often results in unhealthy competition or compromise between departments, and less than optimal use of web pages.

2. Liquid versus fixed layoutsOn the web the designer has no control over several factors, including the size of the browser window, the web browser used, the input devices used (mouse, touch screen, voice command, text, cell phone number pad, etc.) and the size and characteristics of available fonts. Some designers choose to control the appearance of the elements on the screen by using specific width designations. This control may be achieved through the use of a HTML table-based design or a more semantic div-based design through the use of CSS. Whenever the text, images, and layout of a design do not change as the browser changes, this is referred to as a fixed width design. Proponents of fixed width design prefer precise control over the layout of a site and the precision placement of objects on the page. Other designers choose a liquid design. A liquid design is one where the web designing moves to flow content into the whole screen, or a portion of the screen, no matter what the size of the browser window. Proponents of liquid design prefe greater compatibility and using the screen space available. Liquid design can be achieved through the use of CSS, by avoiding styling the page altogether, or by using HTML tables (or more semantic divs) set to a percentage of the page. Both liquid and fixed design developers must make decisions about how the design should degrade on higher and lower screen resolutions. Sometimes the pragmatic choice is made to flow the web designing between a minimum and a maximum width. This allows the designer to avoid coding for the browser choices making up The Long Tail, while still using all available screen space. Depending on the purpose of the content, a web designer may decide to use either fixed or liquid layouts on a case-by-case basis. Similar to liquid layout is the optional fit to window feature with Adobe Flash content. This is a fixed layout that optimally scales the content of the page without changing the arrangement or text wrapping when the browser is resized.

3. Flash.Adobe Flash (formerly Macromedia Flash) is a proprietary, robust graphics animation or application development program used to create and deliver dynamic content, media (such as sound and video), and interactive applications over the web via the browser. Adobe Flash is today widely used in Web Designing. Flash is not a standard produced by a vendor-neutral standards organization like most of the core protocols and formats on the Internet. Flash is much more restrictive than the open HTML format, though, requiring a proprietary plug-in to be seen, and it does not integrate with most web browser UI features like the “Back” button.According to a study, [1] 98% of US Web users have the Flash Player installed. [2] Numbers vary depending on the detection scheme and research demographics. [3] Many graphic artists use Flash because it gives them exact control over every part of the design, and anything can be animated and generally “jazzed up”. Some application designers enjoy Flash because it lets them create applications that do not have to be refreshed or go to a new web page every time an action occurs.

When Netscape Navigator 4 dominated the browser market, the popular solution available for designers to lay out a Web page was by using tables. Often even simple web designing for a page would require dozens of tables nested in each other. Many web templates in Dreamweaver and other WYSIWYG editors still use this technique today. Navigator 4 didn’t support CSS to a useful degree, so it simply wasn’t used. After the browser wars subsided, and the dominant browsers such as Internet Explorer became more W3C compliant, designers started turning toward CSS as an alternate means of laying out their pages. CSS proponents say that tables should be used only for tabular data, not for layout. Using CSS instead of tables also returns HTML to a semantic markup, which helps bots and search engines understand what’s going on in a web page. All modern Web browsers support CSS with different degrees of limitations. However, one of the main points against CSS is that by relying on it exclusively, control is essentially relinquished as each browser has its own quirks which result in a slightly different page display. This is especially a problem as not every browser supports the same subset of CSS rules. For designers who are used to table-based layouts, developing Web sites in CSS often becomes a matter of trying to replicate what can be done with tables, leading some to find CSS design rather cumbersome due to lack of familiarity. For example, at one time it was rather difficult to produce certain design elements, such as vertical positioning, and full-length footers in a web designing using absolute positions. With the abundance of CSS resources available online today, though, web designing with reasonable adherence to ,;;’ standards involves little more than applying CSS 2.1 or CSS 3 to properly structured markup. These days most modern browsers have solved most of these quirks in CSS rendering and this has made many different CSS layouts possible. However, some people continue to use old browsers, and designers need to keep this in mind, and allow for graceful degrading of pages in older browsers. Most notable among these old browsers are Internet Explorer 5 and 5.5, which, according to some web designers, are becoming the new Netscape Navigator 4 – a block that holds the World Wide Web back from converting to CSS design. However, the W3 Consortium has made CSS in combination with XHTML the standard for web designing.

Form versus Function:

Some web developers have a graphic arts background and may pay more attention to how a page looks than considering other issues such as how visitors are going to find the page via a search engine. Some might rely more on advertising than search engines to attract visitors to the site. On the other side of the issue, search engine optimization consultants (SEOs) are concerned with how well a web site works technically and textually: how much traffic it generates via search engines, and how many sales it makes, assuming looks don’t contribute to the sales. As a result, the designers and SEOs often end up in disputes where the designer wants more ‘pretty’ graphics, and the SEO wants lots of ‘ugly’ keyword-rich text, bullet lists, and text links. One could argue that this is a false dichotomy due to the possibility that a web designing may integrate the two disciplines for a collaborative and synergistic solution. Because some graphics serve communication purposes in addition to aesthetics, how well a site works may depend on the graphic designer’s visual communication ideas as well as the SEO considerations. Another problem when using a lot of graphics on a page is that download times can be greatly lengthened, often irritating the user. This has become less of a problem as the internet has evolved with high-speed internet and the use of vector graphics. This is an engineering challenge to increase bandwidth in addition to an artistic challenge to minimize graphics and graphic file sizes. This is an on-going challenge as increased bandwidth invites increased amounts of content.

Accessible Web design:

Main article:

Web accessibilityTo be accessible, web pages and sites must conform to certain accessibility principles. These can be grouped into the following main areas:use semantic markup that provides a meaningful structure to the document (i.e. web page)Semantic markup also refers to semantically organizing the web page structure and publishing web services description accordingly so that they can be recognized by other web services on different web pages. Standards for semantic web are set by IEEE-use a valid markup language that conforms to a published DTD or Schema-provide text equivalents for any non-text components (e.g. images, multimedia)-use hyperlinks that make sense when read out of context. (e.g. avoid “Click Here.”)-don’t use frames-use CSS rather than HTML Tables for layout.-author the page so that when the source code is read line-by-line by user agents (such as a screen readers) it remains intelligible. (Using tables for web designing will often result in information that is not.)However, W3C permits an exception where tables for layout either make sense when linearized or an alternate version (perhaps linearized) is made available.Website accessibility is also changing as it is impacted by Content Management Systems that allow changes to be made to webpages without the need of obtaining programming language knowledge.

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Web site content
Domain name
Browser capability
Web site structure
Navigational linking structure
Page accessibility
Credibility

There are several ways to efficiently optimize for the factors listed above. These things include: choosing reliable web hosting, choosing an appropriate domain name, optimizing your web site for all web browsers, creating logical site structure and navigational menus, generating a sitemap, and creating an About Us page and a privacy policy page.

A well laid out design and structure helps to improve any businesses or entrepreneur’s performance of their web site and also helps users to navigate it, allowing search engines to better find and index all of the written content which is included on the web site.

You should ask yourself the following questions during the web design process:

Is my site appealing to visitors?
Is my web site search engine friendly?

Web Site Structure Basics to Consider During Your SEO Process

Find a web host
Establish a domain name
Plan and design a web site structure
Optimize within multiple browsers
Design a sitemap
Create a contact us page
Create a privacy policy
Link within subject matter themes

About CODANK Charlotte Web Design

CODANK is a top Charlotte Web Design and Internet Marketing Company located in Charlotte, NC. The company is dedicated to providing a broad range of web design services. CODANK specializes in Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Graphic Design, Online Marketing, and Web Design and Development.

For more information, visit CODANK Charlotte Web Design and Internet Marketing Company at www.codank.com

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One of the quickest ways to identify the Windows XP is by the green start button and blue taskbar on the bottom of your computer screen, but it is responsible for much more than that. Microsoft in a way started over with the way they presented operating systems for their users.

Before XP (short for “experience”), there were two strands of operating systems in use by computer users in the late 90’s—one was a business/networking friendly version known as Windows NT (which was upgraded to Windows 2000, in the year 2000). The other version was a consumer friendly version known as Windows 98 (succeeded by Windows ME, also in 2000).

Microsoft not only greatly improved the performance and, what they considered to be a vast improvement to usability, XP also replaced the two “strands” of Windows OS’s into one operating system. XP is alternatively named “Windows 5.1” because it follows the Windows NT code base and is the successor to the NT based Windows 2000 (or, Windows 5.0).

There are multiple versions of XP, but the two most popular are Windows XP Professional Edition (similar to the Windows 2000 format), and Windows XP Home Edition (to replace 98 and ME), but every version is highly similar in the look and feel of XP. The most obvious difference in XP and all its predecessors is the major changes in the GUI, or graphical user interface. The colors, design, even shadows are significant improvements to the “aesthetic” quality, although this is a “classic” option to revert to the Windows 2000 look.

The most important reason for all the changes in the GUI was to improve the usability of all its features, especially for those who are new to computers. Options from the start menu, to the placements of icons and options were “optimized” to make computing simple to do and easy to understand (of course, these improvements may not be appreciated by those who have become accustomed to using a previous version of Windows, so not everyone agrees on the value of them).

The Control Panel, for example, was changed from previous versions to having two views.  The “Classic View” just like the older versions that listed all the options in thumbnails in alphabetical order, and the “Category View” groups similar icons together to help users know where to find the controls they want.

Several upgrades to XP, called a service pack (SP), have been released since the original 2001 release. These are basically security and stability fixes that were available for free from the Microsoft website or as an automatic update. The last upgrade, service pack 3 had over 1,100  fixes! XP SP3 is the only version of XP that is still supported by Microsoft. According to the company, Microsoft will continue supporting (and provides free updates for) XP SP3 until April 2014, even though two newer operating systems, Vista and Windows 7, have already been released.

For information and troubleshooting resources, go to www.microsoft.com/windowsxp.