Web Designing Unit 1 Quick Revision

Good web design is less about decoration and more about making a site easy to use. The notes list eight principles that come up again and again in exam answers.

Keep the design simple and consistent, so pages look and behave the same way across the site. Make text readable, and make sure the site works well on mobile phones. Use a limited, deliberate colour palette. Pages should load quickly, navigation should be easy to follow, and the design should communicate its message clearly.

• Simplicity
• Consistency
• Readability
• Mobile compatibility
• A deliberate colour palette
• Fast loading
• Easy navigation
• Clear communication

A website is planned before it is coded. The notes describe seven stages, which together form a simple project lifecycle.

Start with research and goal setting: who is the site for, and what should it achieve? Then plan the site's structure, design the layout and write the content. Only then is the website coded. After testing it is launched, and maintenance continues for as long as the site is live.

1. Research and goal setting
2. Planning the site
3. Designing the layout
4. Writing content
5. Coding the website
6. Testing and launching
7. Maintenance

Every computer on the internet is reached through an IP address, a string of numbers that is hard to remember. A domain name, such as google.com, is a human-friendly name that points to that address.

Domain names are unique: no two websites can register the same one. The domain name system is coordinated globally by ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, and individual names are registered through domain registrars.

Web hosting is what puts a website on the internet. The site's files are stored on a server, a computer that stays connected and responds when visitors request a page.

A domain name and hosting work together: the domain name is the address people type, and hosting is where the site actually lives. Pointing the domain at the hosting server connects the two.

A static website is made of fixed files built with HTML, CSS and JavaScript. The server sends the same files to every visitor without processing the content first, and there is no database behind the pages.

That makes static sites fast and inexpensive to host. The trade-off is that changing the content usually means editing the files themselves.

A dynamic website builds pages on the server when they are requested, using languages and platforms such as PHP or Node.js, usually together with a database. That is how sites show personalised content, search results or logged-in dashboards.

Because the server does work for every request, dynamic sites are generally slower to respond, and more costly to build and run, than static ones.

The World Wide Web Consortium, or W3C, is the international community that develops open standards for the web, such as CSS and the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. Its standards promote consistency, so websites behave predictably across browsers and devices.

W3C's work takes accessibility, privacy, security and internationalisation into account, and aims to keep the web stable over the long term.

HTML, HyperText Markup Language, is the markup language that describes the structure of a web page: headings, paragraphs, links, images and so on. Browsers read the HTML and display the page.

HTML has gone through several versions, from the early HTML 1.0 and 2.0 through HTML 3.2 and 4.01 to HTML5, the current version. Today HTML is maintained as a continuously updated living standard.

HTML has six heading levels, from <h1> to <h6>. <h1> is the most important heading and is displayed largest by default; each level after it is smaller, down to <h6>.

Use headings to show the structure of a page, not just to make text big: one main <h1> for the page title, then <h2> for sections, <h3> for sub-sections and so on. Screen readers and search engines rely on this structure.

<h1>Web Designing</h1>
<h2>Unit 1</h2>
<h3>Principles of web design</h3>