In designing a website, following disciplines can be used: animation, authoring, communication design, corporate identity, graphic design, human-computer interaction, architecture, interaction, photography, search engine optimization and typography.  Technologies like Markup languages (XHTML and XML), Style sheet languages (such as CSS and XSL), Client-side scripting (such as JavaScript and VBScript), Server-side scripting (such as PHP and ASP), Database technologies (such as MySQL) can be utilized. Website is made up of web pages; these may contain information about a particular subject etc. The website may be static or dynamic, allowing interaction. While designing a website, it is important to keep the content, usability, appearance and visibility in mind.

With increased competition online, it’s important to design as attractive websites as possible; one way to do this is to utilize the flash technology. Using flash makes a website more professional looking and user friendly, it presents plain textual information in a much easy format with the help of easy navigation and imagery.Flash is also adaptable to other technologies, making it more popular, it can work well with various platforms like Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop, Punch Software AS4000, CorelDraw, Freehand, and PageMaker etc. Flash enabled videos, flash intros, flash advertisements and flash logo can definitely make the website more attractive. All these features help in increased traffic flow to the website.

With the increasing usage of internet mobile phones, it has become important for website designers to create websites that are easily loadable on mobile phones, look as attractive as they do on PC’s and also function well.

While designing a website it is also important to design it in a manner that increases Search Engine optimization. For this it is important to implement an internal linking strategy that enhances the way spiders crawl the website and increase the Google page rank. Spiders work from top left to bottom right, and if tables are present they start from the top left table, scan its contents and move on to the next table so on and so forth. In case the website is designed using tables and not CSS, and a left hand navigation table is present followed by a table containing the main content of the website, the spider will read the top table and then skip the rest moving away from the home page. It will not come back until hitting the home page link. To rectify this, the navigation table should be either placed left to the content or an empty table should be placed on the top left, followed by the content table and then a left aligned navigation table. This way the full benefit of the key word could be utilized. (Nisbet 2008)

Some of the latest trends identified by Smashing Magazine for 2009 include:

Using PNG transparency to make the background stand out more, thus making the site more attractive. This can also be used to place emphasis on a headline or an important announcement.

Second Generation of Pop-ups, modal boxes (dialog windows) provide a user-friendly alternative to classic JavaScript windows and support users by focusing their attention on the most important area of the website. These are triggered by some user action like logging in and appear on top of the main content.

With more people having access to broad band internet, loading of heavy material has become somewhat a non-issue, exploiting this opportunity the designers are using media blocks (for videos and screencasts). With this method the users can understand the material more easily and quickly.

Reference List

Dare, D., (n.d.). Introduction to website design. Retrieved August 23, 2009 from http://www.goarticles.com/cgi-bin/showa.cgi?C=1811228

Hidden Brains. (n.d.). Flash – A Value Addition Technology for Website Designing. Retrieved August 23, 2009 from http://www.hiddenbrains.com/article-flash-a-value-addition-technology-for-website-designing.html

Synavpse(2009). Web Development and Flash: For the Right Blend. Retrieved August 23, 2009 from http://www.articlesbase.com/web-design-articles/web-development-and-flash-for-the-right-blend-1149894.html

Nisbet,P.,.(2008). Advanced SEO Techniques: Website Design, Internal Page Rank and Nofollow. Retrieved August 23, 2009 from http://www.qsoftvietnam.com/links/website-promotion/seo-techniques-website-design-pagerank-nofollow/

Smashing Editorial. (2009).Web Design Trends for 2009. Retrieved August 23, 2009 http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/01/14/web-design-trends-for-2009/