A creation requires a creator. Websites have been with us since August 1991, when Tim Berners-Lee made the first website with his newly designed language called Hypertext Markup Language, or HTML. Thereafter the phenomenal growth of the web has been possible because of the web designer and developer. Web design refers to the designing of web pages, websites and web applications. The term also refers to web-based Graphical user interface design using images, CSS and one of the HTML standards. Some people distinguish between "web design" (the graphics and user interface design) and web development, which includes "web design" as well as web server configuration, writing web applications, dealing with security issues, etc. It is obvious that both the front-end as well as the structure and logic of a website are critical issues to the success of a site, and they have to go hand in hand.
The priorities and the technologies used would depend on the objectives as well as the target audience (the target audience might have narrowband, or older browsers, or no Flash plug-ins, resulting in an incapacity to view Flash and image based, or CSS based, ‘heavy’ designs). Every instance of web design witnesses a struggle between the propensity to create a fixed layout and a liquid layout (which HTML was originally created to do). While Macromedia Flash adds functionality and a lot of beauty, it may not be capable of providing extensive text, is SEO unfriendly and machine unreadable, and is bandwidth hungry. One also has to decide whether to include CSS (Cascading Style Sheets, a novel way to provide design guidelines to HTML elements) so as to rescue HTML from becoming a design language into what it is – a structuring and markup logic.
There is the eternal battle between how it looks and how it works. Web development is a difficult work requiring mastery over many areas. Successful websites are only those that were designed with proper objectives in mind, by making a handsome compromise with all design and development issues.
Web design is a big industry today, despite the dot com crash of a few years ago. More and more companies are coming online and many are redesigning, making a huge market for web designers. In fact, the industry is expected to grow at the rate of 20% in the next five years. In this section of the directory, we provide a detailed list of web designers and developers, and other web design resources.