What's A Website ?
What's A Website ? A Website is space on a computer where anyone who subscribes can say "This is me, this is what I do, or what I am interested in, what I know, or what I can sell you". An electronic brochure and source of information available to the whole world 24 hours a day. Within the website, each screenful of information is called a page. Pages may contain text, or graphic images, or even photographs, sound and video. A main feature are the "links" embedded within a page that can be clicked with a computer mouse and which transport viewers to other pages. To continue with the brochure analogy, you would normally open a brochure at the front or the back and browse forwards or backwards a page at a time. With a website, the user decides the order they want to see the pages in by clicking the links that interest them. This interactivity generates a sense of ownership and participation in the user, binding them to the information much more tightly than a traditional brochure. To maximise this benefit, it really needs someone with an understanding of interactive programming to get the best out of creating the electronic pages and links that build the website.
What sort of websites are there?
There are many sorts of Websites, ranging from a single page "This is us" offering, through to mammoth Websites like the UK Open Government site which has several thousand pages full of information about legislation, taxation, grants and funding, VAT, employment, trade and industry, planning, commerce and so on, together with links to all the government departments and agencies. Websites may be provided by individuals (in which case they are usually called homepages), special interest groups, such as "The Association of Widget Collectors", educational establishments like universities, or science and research centres, Governments, voluntary organisations, individual retailers, banks and businesses, manufacturers and importers, news, media and financial organisations and multinational corporations. Although the size of the organisations may differ, each has the same opportunity and scope. A small businesses can have the same presence and create the same image as a multinational. Each chooses the style and content of its own pages.
What is a Web Page ?
A web page is a "screenful" of information. It can be physically many times the length of a A4 sheet of paper, or only a few lines. Different lengths of page are used for different purposes and in different circumstances. When we speak of a web page in terms of design, we generally consider it to be on average, one screen wide and, typically, about half a paper A4 page or a bit longer.
Pages can have coloured backgrounds, or textures, so it is possible to carry themes through a multi-page site by the use of colour. Care needs to be taken however, because not all viewers will have the latest high tech equipment capable of seeing more than 216 colours, and in some circumstances, it will be necessary to limit the number of colours to avoid confusion for users. This sort of quality experience and attention to detail is our hallmark. Pages serve different purposes. For example, on a small multi-page website, the first page is likely to be a sort of summary, contents or menu page, from which other pages may be accessed.
If it is a huge site, there may be cascading layers of contents pages, or an "image map" of the site on each of the pages, to make navigation around the site easier. A popular vogue at the moment is a coloured panel on the left or top of the screen to locate the sitemap and navigational controls, as on this page. Some pages will be mostly information, and therefore biased toward text. Others will be a mixture of text and photographs or computer graphics, perhaps even animated, and some pages could be mostly images.
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| A sample banner |
Page Furniture
Page furniture can improve the layout of your web pages.
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 Decorative features |
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 such as bullet points |
| or attractive section divider lines |
| such as these |
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