Tuesday 17 August 2010

The definition of a web designer

A web designer is a person, who designs and at times, creates websites, along with other applications. As it is, web design refers to creating presentations of content which is delivered to the end-user through the internet, with the help of a Web browser as well as other Web-enabled applications such as micro-blogging clients, Internet television clients as well as RSS readers.

A designer might or might not be a programmer. However, most of them have some sort of programming skills. Several web designers are web programmers as well, which means that they are not only the architect of the page but they also implement their designs through programming. Designers can therefore be called writer as well as a computer expert.

An extremely important task of the designer is creative design of the web pages, which is generally worked out with a client who expresses certain needs or that the web pages are required to fulfill. Web designers usually have proficiency in graphics software, such as Photoshop, and many of them are also quite good with programs such as Java. A web designer usually has to work with a number of media programs. Overall, the objective is to create web pages with a particular design, a standardized graphic set, as well as eye grabbing details. A designer might also write contents for web pages, depending upon the requirements of the client, although sometimes they simply edit or program contents that the clients provide.

There may or may not be any difference between a designer and a programmer. As it is, programmers might only implement designs through programming in XTML, HTML, and several other languages. They might set special functions such as shopping cart software. Apart from that, they may also be responsible for the maintenance of the existing web pages as well as introduction of new information. A web designer, particularly one with a lot of talent might also do this. As a matter of fact several designers provide both design as well as programming services.

A designer should always keep himself/herself updated with the latest trends of the Internet industry. He/she must have knowledge of what services have been expected, he/she should also know as to what graphics would be liked and enjoyed, as well as how high a webpage would rank in the search engines results. Apart from that, they may also assist clients in formulating plans on increasing the visibility of the web pages.

In today’s world, where the internet is getting bigger with every passing day, a web designer has an increasingly important role to play.

Wednesday 10 February 2010

Web Standards and its disregard by all major search engines?

I'm a big fan of that little icon which you stick on your website 'To show your readers that you've taken the care to create an interoperable Web page, you may display this icon on any page that validates.'. (Do a Google search you'll find it fine!). My main question is if we're all supposed to follow this (and I've been advised on many occasions it helps with search engine optimisation) then why the hell do the major search engines not bother to follow more or less ANY of these standards?

I checked Google, Yahoo, AOL, Ask. None of these search engines follow web design standards?

Is it because the search engines don't need to be found?