Web design encompasses a variety of disciplines and skills in the creation and maintenance of web sites. The various disciplines of web design include web graphics design; user interface (UI) design; creative web authoring; search engine optimization; and user experience design. All these areas require the development and implementation of complex computer systems that are designed to perform specific tasks and to interact with real users.
A good web design is one that is both aesthetically pleasant and functionally effective. It is also important to choose the right tools and appropriate software in order to make an aesthetically pleasant website. Good aesthetics cannot be ignored in the field of online marketing. As aesthetic aspects are of equal importance as they are to aesthetics in other offline mediums, it is advisable to use the right aesthetics software for the job. There are several software packages that can help to create good web designs. Some of these packages include Dreamweaver, Frontpage, Photoshop, Illustrator, Fireworks, Corel Draw, and Microsoft Flash.
In addition to using web design tools to produce aesthetically pleasing websites, the web designer needs to have knowledge of graphic design, web typography, and interface designing. Graphic design includes creative visual arts such as painting, illustration, photography, printmaking, and sculpture; other visual design includes architecture, motion graphics, icon design and computer-aided design (CAD). In web typography, a web designer uses words, numbers, fonts and spaces to represent text. Web designers often use software packages such as Dreamweaver, Photoshop, HTML, and XHTML to produce hypertext structures. Interface design refers to the arrangement of content on a web page so that it is easy for users to interact with it. It is often used to provide a graphical user interface, which enables a user to select an item, click on it, move it, or select another item.