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Websites and the World Wide Web - what are they?

The Web, or World Wide Web (www) is a series of linked (by hyperlinks) documents that can be accessed via the internet.

The web and internet are often confused but are actually two different things - the web is the network of documents that is hosted on the internet, which is a giant network of computers that can communicate with each other. The web as we know it came about in the late eighties, an invention of British physicist Tim Berners-Lee, then an employee of Cern in Switzerland. The first browser was made available to the public a couple of years later, allowing anyone in the world to access 'The Web'.

To access the internet, a user requires a computer, an internet connection and a program known as a browser, which allows your computer to interpret web resources. Viewing a webpage requires the user to type in a 'Domain name' or URL into a browser to go directly to any given site, or navigate to a Search engine. Search engines constantly crawl the web for any document they are able to access and record content from each of those pages, ranking them by how relevant and suitable they are to the user searching, based on what they're searching for. Originally, websites were only able to display information with limited functionality, but as the technology has grown, so has the capability of the web and websites to interact with users and to query any number of data sources, resulting in the web being the necessity in each of our lives it is today.

Could you imagine going a day without checking your social media accounts, making a purchase from one of the millions and millions of online shopping sites, or managing your daily admin via an email account or online banking? I certainly couldn't!

What technologies do you use to design websites?

For functionality, we use php, an open-source, commonly used scripting language that is particularly well suited to web development and that can be inserted into HTML. For Content Managed Websites we use Wordpress, an open source, online website creation tool built in php. We use HTML5, CSS3 and Javascript to develop front-end website interaction, functionality and animation. We use SQL and MYSQL wherever we need a database, and from a design perspective we use the Adobe Creative suite to create for the web.

Web development and web design - what's the difference?

To build a fully functional, beautifully designed website traditionally requires a web developer and a web designed working together, to cover off all aspects of the design and build. While it is true that a lot of developers are comfortable designing and a lot of designers are comfortable developing the two disciplines are distinctly different:

A web developer is primarily responsible for coding, server-side, in order to allow the website to function. This can include managing the server and the transfer of files and additionally some client-side scripting such as Javascript, but it is predominantly programming.

A web designed on the other hand is responsible for the aesthetics of the site, along with the user-journey and experience. This may also include client-side scripting such as Javascript and HTML, but it is traditionally about the design and layout of the page, imagery, colours, branding and user behaviour.

How have mobile devices influenced web design, and what are responsive websites?

Two in every three minutes spent online are spent by users using a handheld mobile device (phone/tablet), while thirteen percent of adults in the United Kingdom browse the web only on their mobile phone, whereas 11 percent browse the web only on their desktop which highlights the trend in the diminishing reliance on desktop computers in favour of mobile devices. Over the last two years, tablet use to browse the internet has increased by around 33%, whereas in the same time frame mobile use in browsing the web has increased by almost 80%, whereas desktop use in browsing the web has diminished.

This has influenced the way that web designers are now required to build websites. Because of the high likelihood that someone who arrives at your site will be using a mobile device, it is now the norm to design for 'mobile first', which means that everything functions and renders beautifully on a mobile device first and foremost, and then secondarily we will consider how it looks and feels on a desktop. It seems like a long time ago that companies were happy for users to browse the full version of their website on their smartphone, having to scrollabround the page and zoom into areas they were interested in looking at in closer detail, struggling to navigate using tiny text hyperlinks.

One practice, when smartphones were becoming popular, was to create a totally separate version of your site for mobiles, but as technology has developed it is now possible to use css to adapt your website to the device it is being viewed upon, so the user is effectively seeing exactly the same page irrespective of their device, it is just rendered differently because it is pulling in different styles. A website built in this way is known as 'responsive'.

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