Useful Tools

Useful Tools

The world of web design has seen tremendous growth over the last decade. We have built a great foundation on which we can develop a new strategy for web design. A wide variety of web design tools are available to meet the needs of even the most advanced designer. The following technologies and techniques would lead to an easy and effective design.

XHTML has formally taken over as the next standard of HTML. XHTML is the name given to the HTML compatible version of XML. Both look similar but there are important differences. XML has better browser support. It adds more meaning and structure to your data and also makes search engine results more relevant. Converting your HTML into XHTML will help you to separate design and content.

HTML was designed to use free-flowing layouts. You had little control over the display of your text and images. Dynamic HTML is HTML with a few new elements plus access to those elements via a scripting language. The new elements give you more accurate control over how your page looks. The new object model lets you control those elements using scripts.

Cascading style sheets are a new method to format your page layout, text, fonts, and images. Style sheets allow you to place things exactly where you want them to be on the page, using the distance in pixels from the top and the left of the browser window. If a style is declared in the head section of a page, a change to the style changes the style on the entire page.

JavaScript is a useful tool at times. You can create navigation boxes, rollover effects, and other nice tricks. But there are things that JavaScript cannot do. JavaScript cannot write to a file. Without this ability, you cannot save information for use on other pages, or give access to this information to other users. This is something that is needed for counters, keeping statistics, guest books, message boards, and other such applications. If you need something like this, you should go with CGI if possible. Keep JavaScript for fairly simple tasks.

Flash provides a high degree of freedom of development. It allows the designer to place objects anywhere they like. You also no longer need to worry about which browsers your page will render correctly in and which will not work. Flash allows you to incorporate sound into your pages via mp3 and wav files. You can also directly import digital video into Flash. Typical Web search engines or spiders cannot index content within Flash movies. This is perhaps the biggest shortcoming of Flash.

The Flash player plug-in penetration is now at around 97%. Compared to Windows Media Player plug-in at 59%, Real-Player plug-in at 56% and QuickTime player plug-in at 41%, Flash is way ahead.

These powerful tools of web designing encompass every aspect of designing web pages. Appropriate use of these tools promises a much better and user-friendly structure for your website.