Web 101- Part 1- How the Web Works
The website should be more than another pretty face
CLICK HERE for Part 2- Parts of your website
I often say a website is like an iceberg- it's the part you dont see that can hurt you. What the User sees is determined by a combination of how the code is written and how the code is interpreted by:
- the monitor
- the operating system
- the browser
- the server (especially if retrieving and displaying information from a database)
All these things affect the colors you see, the fonts, the sizes and whether the site works or not.
The Web User
A good web designer takes into account as much as can be known (and learned from site statistics) about the user and his concerns and needs as well as his way of using the site. A good website is user-concentric (all about defining and meeting the needs of the user).
It all starts (or ends, depending on how you look at it) with the web user. The web user makes choices and has his or her agenda about:
- What they are looking for
- How fast/easy they want the information
- What they like
- What they will do when they find what they want
The Front End and the Monitor
A good website design is visually pleasing without being busy, distracting or unfocused. The user should be able to find things easily and where she expects to find them.
The Front End
is the visual part of the website. Also called the User Interface, it includes the Visual Content
and Text
The Monitor is the part of the computer which displays the front end and can affect the appearance by resolution and color display.
A website's appearance can be affected by the code, the monitor, the Operating System, the browser, the files on the server (missing, corrupted or wrongly named) or the server itself (if it's working, if the database exists and any code to or from it).
The Back End
Well written code is essential to the website. While some code simply wont work with errors (PHP, ASP), other code will (HTML) and the web designer needs to be able to find and correct those errors.
The Back End of the website includes the code to show the user what to see.
Code tells the browser how to display the page.
- HTML, XML, XHTML codes act as holders for the content.
- CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets which hold the display rules for the site (fonts, colors, placement of things within the page).
- JavaScript is a code for user-side interaction.
- PHP and ASP (among others) are codes for server-side interaction.
Operating System
There are several Operating Systems (such as MacOS, Windows XP, Windows 8) and they can affect, to a lesser extent, how the website looks.
Browser
One of the biggest challenges to web designers and web developers is cross-browser compatibility - meaning the site looks virtually the same on the major browsers, and as much as possible, on the others.
There are many browsers (and with mobile- there are many, many more). Browser examples are Internet Explorer, Mozilla, Chrome and Safari. They are the primary interpreter rendering the code into a visual site. The big challenge for web designers is that no 2 interpret the code exactly the same, so a site may look fine in one browser, but terrible in another. The major browsers are coming much closer to similar renderings, but mobile browsers are throwing a new spanner in the works. The same mobile browser can display differently on 2 versions of the same phone.
Also, different browsers react differently to errors in code, file names(upper and lower case for example - little.jpg is not the same as Little.jpg) and paths (references from one folder to another). One may display in spite of the error but another may not. This is another reason it is critical to check a website on different browsers.
Server
The host is the server provider. Richterworks recommends using a professional web hosting company. They spend millions to protect your website from downtime and hackers. Usernames and passwords to the host tend to be a huge gap in website security. Be sure to change these from the default (assigned ones) immediately, at least once a year, and after any change in web professional.
Servers are like large computers which hold the files for a website (or many websites, or part of a website- all depending on the size of the server and the size of the website) as well as any database that might be associated with the site. All the pages, CSS (style rules), images and interactive scripts are held in folders much like you would have on your computer. Getting them from the computer to the server is called an FTP upload. Depending on the type of files in the website, you may need one kind of a server rather than another- some do not process certain code, but process other code.