Web design is divided into two parts: the front end (what the user actually sees) and the back end of web design (how it all works). The back end is often classified as web programming rather than web design, but it’s a good skill to know both sides of the process, rather than to have a separate designer and programmer working on the same websites.
When you hear the term “code”, you probably just imagine a bunch of lines that you will never understand, but you must wrap your head around the concept and keep stuffing more and more coding into your website in order to create a successful product and make your website look and behave the way you want it to. In web design, there are many coding languages, such as HTML, CSS, JavaScript and PHP.
Front end web design:
This is the way the website will look. In “Web Design”, this uses some programming languages, such as HTML, CSS and JavaScript.
HTML – This is the basis of the layout of all websites and it contains a list of all the elements that are going to be on your web page.
CSS – This styles your page and tells the browser how to present the website e.g. make the text red, change the size of the font; to use bold, underline, italics and so on.
JavaScript – This controls the functionality of the website. For example, if you want to make something onscreen to pop up or do something when you hover or click on a link.
Back end web design:
This is classified as the programming work behind the scenes. In “Web Programming”, this uses programming languages such as PHP.
PHP – This can be used to make many different virtual functions, for example, it can validate forms, store data to a database and create new pages within the website. It’s the backbone of any website.
This sounds very complicated, but it’s not as bad as it seems. Web design is about little bits and pieces that form the complete picture when they are put together.
The design of a website or a blog should be lightweight, to help it to open effectively, and it should also be responsive to SEO. We should consider that there are many steps when designing sections of websites or blogs, such as layout, which we now know uses HTML, CSS and JavaScript, and also uses PHP for the back end web design; the server-side script.
