Basics of Website Design
- 1. Integrated Intelligent Research (IIR) International Journal of Web Technology Volume: 01 Issue: 01 June 2012 Page No.12-14 ISSN: 2278-2389 12 Basics of Website Design G.Sreedhar Assistant Professor,Department of Computer Science Rashtriya Sanskrit Vidyapeetha, (Deemed University),Tirupati Abstract- In the last few years, web applications have experienced a rapid and drastic development in terms of scale, complexity and underlying technologies. A Web site is a collection of Web pages containing text, images, audio and videos. The complete structure of the Internet is made up of Web sites, a mode of sharing information on the Internet.: Keywords: website, web server, web browser, web content I. INTRODUCTION Over the last few years there has been a remarkable increase in use of the World Wide Web (WWW) for a wide and variety of purposes. There was also a fast growth in its applications. This led the Internet users to realize the importance and the benefits gained from a globally interconnected hypermedia system. On the other hand it causes a larger number of useless, meaningless and badly designed websites on the Internet world causing unwanted additional traffic; this is all because of an unorganized non-planned websites development processes. In present days the internet has quietly become the body of business world with web applications as the brains. The important quality attributes for web applications include reliability, availability, interoperability and security. Therefore methodologies for analyzing, constructing, understanding, testing and maintaining web applications will be essential to the IT industry. II. FEATURES OF WEB APPLICATIONS In the last few years, web applications have experienced a rapid and drastic development in terms of scale, complexity and underlying technologies. The main features of web applications are: Platform independence On the fly and on the need deployment Multiple entries and loose structure Event-driven client and procedural server Lifelong post-development The exponential growth of WWW applications with all their multimedia aspects such as the combination of text, hypertext, images, computer animations, video, sound, etc., have raised the necessity for formal or semiformal methodologies for developing such applications. As a website is a communication media in WWW, first impressions do count, so it must be a compelling and effective online application. This goal could be accomplished by combining a clear understanding of what contributes to an effective online presence aligned with very best in design methodology and technical functionality. Web applications are typically software programs that operate on the internet, interacting with the user through an internet browser. These are increasingly popular in the IT industry. Web applications possess different unique characteristics that make web testing and quality assurance of the applications more complex. The following aspects characterize web applications. a. Massive access of users: Web applications provide cross- platform universal access to web resources for the massive user population. b. The difficulty of establishing the causes for the errors: Since web applications may be accessed by millions of users, errors have a big impact. Finding the origin of errors in web applications may be difficult and its recovery time may not be immediate, given the great number of software elements that intervene. c. The integration of diverse software elements for an application in internet: Web users employ different hardware equipment, network connections, operating systems, middleware and web server support. In a web application, two main components are always required: the backend and front-end. The backend is the software required for an application in internet to operate. The most important software in the backend are: the database servers (MySQL, Oracle, Informix, DB2), web servers (Apache, Netscape Enterprise Server, etc.,) and the interface programming language (HTML, XML, PHP, Servlets, Java, etc.,). The front-end is the software required on the part of the client to allow the systems to access the web. d. Diversity of frameworks to develop, to operate and to maintain a web site: The development of web site requires a great team of people with different profiles and backgrounds. These teams include programmers, graphic designers, usability engineers and specialists in information integration, network experts and database administrators. This diversity of personnel profiles makes reliable web applications development difficult and sometimes unpredictable. Because of the above characteristics web based systems tend to evolve rapidly and undergo frequent modifications, due to new technological and commercial opportunities. In consequence web based systems are very sensitive to errors. Most works on web applications have been on making them more powerful, but relatively little has been done to ensure its quality.
- 2. Integrated Intelligent Research (IIR) International Journal of Web Technology Volume: 01 Issue: 01 June 2012 Page No.12-14 ISSN: 2278-2389 13 III. WEB COMPONENTS OF WEB DESIGN A Web site is a collection of Web pages containing text, images, audio and videos. The complete structure of the Internet is made up of Web sites, a mode of sharing information on the Internet. Web sites are designed and developed for a wide variety of organizations in areas such as education, business, research and e-commerce. In order to use any methodology for quality assessment, it has to present a complete and structured list of possible areas of complete web site. Based on interviews and different authors’ opinions, a quality assessment must cover all components of web site. The complete list for quality assessment is as follows. Links Forms Cookies Web Indexing Dynamic Interface Components Programming Language Database Navigation Graphics Contents Platform Browsers Settings and Preferences Connection Speed Links: Links are the main feature on web sites. They constitute the mean of transport between pages and guide the user to certain addresses without the user knowing the actual address itself. Forms: Forms are used to submit information from the user to the host, which in turn gets processed and acted upon in some way. Forms can used both on client side and server side and they can be designed using scripting languages such as JavaScript, VBScript, Perl, etc., Cookies: Cookies are used often used to store information about the user and his actions on particular site. When a user accesses a site that uses cookies, the web server sends information about the user and stores it on the client computer in form of a cookie. These can be used to create more dynamic and custom made pages. Web Indexing: There are number of different techniques and algorithms used by different search engines to search the internet. Depending on how the site is designed using Meta tags, frames, HTML syntax, dynamically created pages, passwords or different languages, the site will be searchable in different ways. Dynamic Interface Components: Web pages are not just presented in static HTML any more. Demands for more dynamic features, custom made sites and high interactivity have made the internet a more vivid place than before. Dynamic interface components reside and operate both on server and client side of the web, depending on the application. The most important include java applets, java servlets, Active X Controls, JavaScript, VBScript, CGI, ASP, CSS and third party plug-ins. Programming Language: Differences in web programming language versions or specifications can cause serious problems on both client and server side. For example, when HTML is generated dynamically it is important to know how it is generated. When development is done in a distributed environment where developers, for instance, are geographically separated, this area becomes increasingly important. Make sure that specifications are well spread throughout the development organization to avoid future problems. Databases: Databases play an important role in web application technology, housing the content that the web application manages, running queries and fulfilling user requests for data storage. The most commonly used type of databases in web applications is the relational database and its managed by SQL to write, retrieve and editing of information. Navigation: Navigation describes the way users navigate within a page, between different user interface controls (buttons, boxes, lists, windows, etc.,) or between pages via links. Graphics: The graphics of web site include images, animations, borders, colors, movie clips, fonts, backgrounds, buttons etc. Content: Content should be correct, accurate and relevant to the information presented in the website. Platform (OS): There are several different operating systems that are being used on the market today, and depending on the configuration of the user system, compatibility issues may occur. Different applications may work fine under certain operating systems. Browsers: The browser is the most central component on the client side of the web. Browsers come in different brands and versions and have different support for Java, JavaScript, ActiveX, plugins or different HTML specifications. Settings and Preferences: Depending on settings and preferences of the client machine, web applications may be have differently. These settings include screen resolution, color depth, etc., Connection Speed: Users may differ greatly in connection speed. Users expect minimum download time of the website. IV. ARCHITECTURE OF WEBSITE A Web site is the collection of web pages organized on a Web server. Web pages are of two types, static and dynamic. Static Web pages are static in nature and requires no change in the content. Dynamic Web pages are dynamic in nature and their content is changing frequently. Dynamic Web pages use database for storing end-user information, product information, transaction data and content. Static Web pages are designed using Hypertext
- 3. Integrated Intelligent Research (IIR) International Journal of Web Technology Volume: 01 Issue: 01 June 2012 Page No.12-14 ISSN: 2278-2389 14 Markup Language (HTML) files. Dynamic Web pages are designed using Dynamic HTML, Scripting Languages and other Web Programming techniques. The organization of web application can be divided into three major tiers according to the placement of components. They are Web Browser tier Web Server tier Database Server tier Web Browser Tier: A Web browser is a software application that is used to search, view and navigate Web pages hosted by Web Server over the Internet. The end user requests a Web page by entering a URL in the address bar of the Web browser. The Web browser in turn sends the request to the Web server, which sends an HTML page back to Web browser. The end user then views the returned page. The Web browser acts as the client in the client/server architecture of Web server technology. Some of the popular Web browsers are Internet Explorer, Netscape Navigator and Mozilla. Web Server Tier: A Web server acts as a gateway between client and DBMS residing on the server. It is an application that serves Web pages over the Internet using the HTTP protocol. The HTTP is a Hypertext Transfer Protocol used by the WWW to establish client and server interactions. Web servers publish Web sites, maintain network traffic and manage user data. Web servers also help in incorporating the network hierarchy in a Web site. Some of the Web servers are Apache Web Server, Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS) and Web star. Database Server Tier: Database access interfaces such as ODBC and JDBC are used to connect web applications with database servers. The communication between web application components may also flow through plain TCP sockets, Java RMI or CORBA. A simple architecture of Web application is shown in the following figure 1. Fig 1.3: Detailed Architecture of Website V. CONCLUSION The main theme of this paper to view the all components of website that ultimately provides the platform for the effective website design. It is a very primitive paper and also very much required for those people who want to do any research in web mining, web engineering and other applications of web engineering.