Website Design
Design Considerations
Theme/Content
Website Structure
Page Layout
Aesthetics
Content vs Style
Maintainability
Tech Requirement
Future Scalability
Website Security
Browser Support
Graceful Degradation
Accessibility
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Webpage Coding

Website Design Considerations

Technical Requirements

There are quite a number of technologies that can be employed within your website. Using xHTML and CSS combined with the design ideas described within these pages and others is a basic level of technology that will be assumed as a given starting point.

This is all that is needed to provide a high quality, easily maintained and scalable set of static webpages that will put out your message and information on the Internet for the whole world to see in the most efficient way possible.

But you can go a lot further, with some fairly simple scripting you can add a dynamic element to your pages. You can use client-side JavaScript to reduce static HTML volume for repetitive code, pass messages to the user according to interactions with the page, write DHTML applications and games and much more.

Full two-way interaction is also possible using server-side CGI programs, usually written in Perl (or PHP or similar) These will allow much more sophisticated interactions between your website and its visitors up to and including data exchange and storage, session control, security features, mailing and more, in short almost anything that can be done on the Internet is usually done in this way.

Storage of information on the server can be done using simple text files read by the CGI programs but for larger sites scalability will also be an issue and it is here that a proper database really comes into its own.

The issue at the design stage is to decide which of these facilities you want, or may want to add in the future and plan around them. CGI utilities can often be added at a later date easily, but JS used to add section of the page needs to be defined at the outset as later changes may be difficult.

You need to consider the work required to implement 'advanced' ideas against the benefits gained by doing so. Avoid adding technical complexity without a good reason, but at the same time don't be afraid to innovate!

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