Internetto Da Vinci - Web Page Design

A Web Hosting Article Contributed by Samwell

Web Page Design Basics

On of the main things to remember when you are doing web page design is that it is a different medium from other types of writing or design. Because of the medium of the internet you can't expect the same results as print. For one thing, large amounts of unbroken text are a mistake. You need graphic elements as well as short paragraphs and pages. It is better to use a link to a new web page than to make an article go on for 10 pages.

Also, you have different issues with graphic objects and files. If you use a graphic in web page design you have to make sure that the page has a proper link to the graphic. We will go more into the proper use of graphics in a separate section of the article.

Another thing you should know is the basics of designing with HTML code. HTML is the basic building block of web page design. Even if you use an application like Front Page or Netscape Composer, which are WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) applications you should know HTML Basics so that you can do a minor edit. I will give you more information on HTML in the next section.

Web Page Design with Html

If you use HTML code for web page design you can use any text editor to design your page. The first Web Site that I designed was all in Notepad and it was seven pages long with animated gifs and two pages of thumbnailed graphics, which if you have been surfing the web for very long, will know are small sized pictures that are links to larger pictures that come up when you click the graphic.

Now I don't tell this story to blow my own horn, I only did it because I wanted to learn HTML code.

HTML uses tags, which tell the web browser how to display the text or picture. If you look below you will see the proper way to use tags. The tags represented below are the bold tags. As you can see there are two tags, one on each side of the word. The first tag - is the opening tag which tells the browser to start displaying the text after it as bold text. The second tag - is the closing tag which tells the browser to stop the bold text display.

Bold would look like the text below but without the asterisks.

Bold

You can use HTML tags in combination with each other as long as the closing tags are in the same order as the opening tags. There are many HTML tutorials on the web, and as I have stated, you should at least attempt to learn the basics, if you want to create a web page.

Graphics in Web Page Design

Graphics play a very important part in web page design. They help to give the page visual appeal as well as break up the text and illustrate the point you are trying to make. You can also use a graphic as an a logo for your page, especially if it is a business page. This could be your initials in a stylized format and saved in a graphic format. or a picture that puts across the image you wish to present to people. The two biggest formats for graphics on web pages are gifs or jpegs.

I myself prefer to use gifs as they are more versatile and you can find animated gifs online, as well as create your own with Paint and a Gif animation application. I am a computer instructor and as part of my adult 12 students final assignment they were required to create a web page which included an animated gif. There are a lot of freeware and demo applications that you can use to create animated gifs.

There is a lot more that I could say about graphics in web page design, but I am running out of space. stay tuned to this site and I will be submitting an article devoted exclusively to graphics, as well as focusing on each of the other aspects of web page design separately.