The Reciprocal Consulting Blog

Web design has come a long way in the last 20 years. It used to be, if you wanted to build a web page, then you had one option – HTML. Hypertext Markup Language is the basic language of the Web. Today, if you are building a website of any kind, chances are you are going to incorporate HTML into your programming even if you use other languages.

But HTML is not the only language you need, by far. If you expect your web site to have some interactive features, then you’ll need more – much more – than HTML.

CSS, or cascading style sheets, is a language devised to help Web programmers build websites where design elements can be defined in a single document across multiple pages. Then you can use HTML for your content on each individual page.

PHP allows Web site designers the ability to add interactive design features into their web pages without jacking up the HTML.

JavaScript is another interactive and dynamic Web language with some useful features.

Microsoft has joined the web design game as well with its own programming languages and Web application framework. ASP is the basic Web language of Microsoft. ASP.NET allows you to build more dynamic web pages on a Windows server.

Other application frameworks have entered the market as well. One popular one in recent years is the open source Ruby on Rails, which is based on the Ruby programming language. Twitter, and a few other popular websites, was built on Ruby on Rails.

So, to answer the question, how many Web languages do you need for Web design? You really only need one. But if you want to build dynamic web pages that are interactive and keep visitors coming back for more, sometimes you need to incorporate several languages into a single web design.

One of the best developments in web design over the years is the technology called CSS. CSS stands for cascading style sheet. With a CSS file you can make updates to your websites in minutes, updates that used to take hours prior to the development of style sheets.

CSS allows you to make changes to your website across an entire section or your entire site. Rather than go page by page to make changes that affect each page of your website, with CSS you can change the element one time and it changes across your entire website. Isn’t that cool?

There are still some web developers who design pages entirely by HTML using tables. This is a very primitive way to design websites, but it can be done. However, I’d recommend using CSS when practical and possible.

With CSS you can influence the following types of changes sitewide with a single update:

• Navigation menus
• Page background colors
• Font styles and types
• Link attributes
• Page layout
• Column width
• Header and footer details
• Mouseover and hover effects
• Special effects like drop shadows and rounded corners

There’s plenty more you can do with CSS. In fact, you can get quite creative with it. If you are designing web pages today then you must consider CSS in your design strategy. Pages built strictly with HTML are quickly going by the wayside.

CSS – cascading style sheet – is a fairly new method of designing web pages, one that separates the presentation from the content. The main reason style sheets are important is because they allow you to design all the pages of your website with one file rather than use HTML to design every single web page and all the elements on each page. With CSS you can set the design elements one time and apply them to all of your pages by calling the stylesheet forward at the appropriate time.

Web design is no easy task any way you look at it. But HTML has its limitations. With CSS you can overcome those limitations and design your entire website from one document.

Stylesheets operate on classes, the essential element of web design with CSS. Every element on a web page can be assigned a class and you can design a unique look for every web page on your website by using one stylesheet. All you do is assign each web page element a class as defined by the stylesheet.

There are many advantages to doing it this way, but suffice it to say that a website designed with stylesheets is much more flexible than one that isn’t.

Is CSS or tables better for modern web design? You’ll find proponents of both today and many web designers still refuse to use CSS (though, admittedly, most have moved on to CSS). Then there are the new web designers who do their work completely in CSS without the use of tables. I believe it’s important to know how to do both.

There are advantages and disadvantages to both tables and CSS. With CSS, if you want to update your website then you only have to make changes once. Your CSS file define the elements and by making changes in your CSS file, or stylesheet, then you don’t have to do it on every page of your website. This is very important if you have a large website.

Tables, however, are easy to design once you know how. They’re fairly simple. You design the parameters of your table and input the data. Done.

So which should you use? I think it depends. CSS is good for defining page elements that are common to all of the pages on your website. That includes background color, sidebar width, navigation menu characteristics, etc. Those things won’t change from page to page so you want them to be constant. And if you do need to make changes to them it is best to do that in one file rather than having to do it manually on every page of your site.

A table, on the other hand, is best used whenever you have a design element that is unique to a specific page. For instance, in your body copy you are listing neighborhoods you service. You can put them in a table so that they stand out on the page and are set apart from the rest of your content. Easy to scan, easy to read.

When it comes to web design, there are few hard and fast rules. The one you want to pay attention to the most is to think of your site’s user. That’s who your design is for.