Web Design Tutorial for Beginners
Designing a webpage goes beyond aesthetics. It concerns building a whole digital experience that intuitively leads to the accessibility and usability of a product. In this web design tutorial for beginners, we will outline the core aspects of web design, including the languages of the web, the tools of the professional designer, and the best practices of the discipline. Are you ready to begin a never-ending adventure into a skill that will never fade with time? Check out our web designing course syllabus.
Fundamentals: HTML and CSS
To start, web design works with HTML and CSS. HTML is the structure of the faces while the CSS is the style that makes the faces look great.
HTML (Hypertext Markup Language): HTML will be your primary language for creating web content. The construction from HTML is achieved by using tags, text in brackets. There are many possible tags, including a paragraph <p>, <h1> for heading, and <img> for image.
Example:
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<title>My First Webpage</title>
</head>
<body>
<h1>Hello, World!</h1>
<p>This is a paragraph of text.</p>
</body>
</html>
CSS (Cascading Style Sheets): This language controls the way all of your HTML will present. It’s responsible for styles like, colors, fonts, layout, and spacing. The excellence of CSS is by separating your CSS in its own file, you can quickly apply the same styles to multiple pages and create an ideal uniform look.
h1 {
color: blue;
font-size: 24px;
}
p {
text-align: center;
font-style: italic;
}
This CSS code will style all <h1> headings in blue and a size of 24 pixels, and will center and italicize all <p> elements. HTML and CSS together can create beautiful and well-organized webpages.
Beyond the basics, there’s much more to explore.
Advanced HTML
Advanced HTML includes using semantic tags, forms, and multimedia elements.
- Semantic HTML: Tags like <article>, <section>, <nav>, and <footer> are semantic tags. They don’t just structure content; they add meaning, which helps search engines and accessibility tools understand the page better. This is crucial for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and for users with disabilities who rely on screen readers.
- Forms: HTML forms are used to collect user input. Elements like <input>, <textarea>, and <button> are used to create interactive forms for everything from contact pages to login screens.
- Multimedia: HTML5 introduced new ways to embed multimedia. The <video> and <audio> tags allow you to embed video and audio files directly, providing better control and a more consistent user experience than older methods.
Learn more with our HTML Course Online.
Advanced CSS
Advanced CSS involves more sophisticated styling techniques and organization.
- The Box Model: Every HTML element is itself a rectangular box. The CSS Box Model describes how elements are rendered including their content, padding, border, and margin. Knowing the Box Model is essential for controlling the layout of your page.
- Flexbox and Grid: These are the modern CSS layout modules. Flexbox (Flexible Box Layout) is for one-dimensional layouts (a row or a column). Flexbox is perfect for aligning items along a container. CSS Grid is for two-dimensional layouts (both rows and columns). CSS Grid is perfect for complex page layouts with multiple sections.
- Responsive Design: You can use media queries to apply rules based on the characteristics of the user’s device (such as screen width). This allows you to create responsive web pages, making them look good on desktops, tablets, and mobile phones.
- CSS Preprocessors: With CSS preprocessors such as Sass or Less extend the ability of CSS. It allows you to use variables, nesting and functions. This results in more organized, maintainable CSS code, particularly for large projects. You write the code in Sass or Less, and it compiles into standard CSS.
Recommended: CSS Course Online.
The Dynamic Layer: JavaScript
JavaScript (JS) is a dynamic programming language that handles the interactive and functional elements of a webpage. HTML provides the page’s structure, CSS handles the styling, and JS is what makes a website interactive through complex features and dynamic updates of content. JS allows you to enhance the user experience because it responds to user actions, manipulates the page content, and interacts with the server.
Interactivity and User Experience
The key goal of JS is to implement interactivity. JS listens for events that the user triggers, like mouse clicks, key presses, or form submission, and then will perform actions on the webpage. This makes a user interface more responsive and thoughtful.
Consider an example of a button that, when you click the button, it shows or hides a paragraph of text on the webpage. This relies on JS.
// Get the button and paragraph elements from the HTML document
const myButton = document.getElementById(‘myButton’);
const myParagraph = document.getElementById(‘myParagraph’);
// Add a ‘click’ event listener to the button
myButton.addEventListener(‘click’, () => {
// Check if the paragraph is currently hidden
if (myParagraph.style.display === ‘none’) {
// If it is, show it
myParagraph.style.display = ‘block’;
} else {
// Otherwise, hide it
myParagraph.style.display = ‘none’;
}
});
In this instance, document.getElementById is accessing a DOM (Document Object Model), which is one of the most fundamental concepts in JavaScript. The DOM represents the HTML page as a tree of objects, and JavaScript can interact with and manipulate those objects to revise the content, style, and structure of the web page after it has been loaded.
Dynamic Content and APIs
JavaScript is also important for managing dynamic content, which goes beyond reacting to user input. JavaScript can obtain new information from a server without a page refresh; this is called AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML). This is how social media feeds and similar web applications receive real-time information.
JavaScript is able to access APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) to gather information from external services such as a weather forecast, map service, or third-party payment processor.
// Fetch data from a public API
fetch(‘https://api.github.com/users/octocat’)
.then(response => response.json())
.then(data => {
// Log the user’s name to the console
console.log(`User name: ${data.name}`);
// Log the number of public repositories
console.log(`Public repos: ${data.public_repos}`);
})
.catch(error => {
console.error(‘Error fetching data:’, error);
});
In its basic form, this code snippet uses the fetch API to call the GitHub API. When the data is returned, it is parsed into a JSON and then used to render user data. The ability to make requests asynchronously is critical to modern web development and enables a fast, seamless, and dynamic user experience without the need for full page refreshes.
Validation & Animation
JavaScript is also commonly used for client-side form validation. Rather than submitting every user input to a server for validation, JavaScript can help to locally validate user input data before submission. There are many ways to prevent invalid input on server, but having your application respond with real-time validation and error message provides users with rapid feedback and prevents unnecessary server requests.
For example, a simple JavaScript snippet can determine if an email field has a precise email format or if a password input field meets the minimum character/complexity requirements. JavaScript is used to make animations and visual effects. Many simple animations can be controlled with CSS, but JavaScript allows much more control and complexity.
Animations can also be done by driving complex sequences, game-like animations and more simply, by manipulating the animations when scrolling or based on other conditions. Libraries like Three.js even allow to create 3D graphics and manipulate them from within a web browser.
Libraries and Frameworks: To help with complex tasks, developers may turn to javascript libraries and frameworks i.e. jQuery (for simplifying DOM manipulation), React, or Vue.js (for building complex user interfaces).
Explore: JavaScript Course Online.
Layout and Structure in Web Designing
Layout and structure focus on how a webpage’s contents are organized and presented. This is the layout, the roadmap of the site, which is largely controlled with HTML and CSS.
While HTML provides the semantic layout with the various HTML tags <header>, <main>, <article>, and <footer>, which give meaning to the content itself, CSS focuses on the visual layout using things like Flexbox and CSS Grid.
Flexbox allows you to lay things out either in a row or column, so you are limited to a single direction. CSS Grid is much more complicated and allows you to layout things in two-dimensional space, including complicated layouts.
Here is a simple example of a Flexbox layout:
<div class=”flex-container”>
<div class=”item”>Item 1</div>
<div class=”item”>Item 2</div>
<div class=”item”>Item 3</div>
</div>
<style>
.flex-container {
display: flex;
justify-content: space-between;
background-color: #f0f0f0;
padding: 20px;
}
.item {
background-color: #3498db;
color: white;
padding: 15px;
}
</style>
This code produced a horizontal row of 3 items: therefore showing how simple CSS Flexbox can be for alignment and spacing purposes.
Responsive Design
A responsive web design is one that aims to make web pages render well on a variety of devices and screen sizes. Instead of creating separate websites for each device, with responsive design, there is only one site that adapts fluidly as the viewport shrinks or expands. This is accomplished using media queries, which allow for applying different CSS rules depending on the user’s viewport width, device type, or other specified characteristics.
/* Default styles for all screen sizes */
body {
font-family: sans-serif;
padding: 10px;
}
/* Styles applied only on screens wider than 600px */
@media screen and (min-width: 600px) {
body {
background-color: lightblue;
font-size: 1.2rem;
}
}
Mobile-First Design
Mobile-first design is a type of responsive design that prioritizes the user experience on the smallest screens first. Instead of taking a desktop site and then creating mobile rules, with mobile-first design, you will start with the mobile design and code experience first, then enhance the layout and add more experiences later using media queries for the tablet and desktop sizes.
This is ideal for being efficient in design, and allows the majority of users who are mobile to have a fast, clean, and focused mobile-first experience.
UI/UX Design
UI (User Interface) design and UX (User Experience) design are almost always used together but have entirely different definitions.
UI Design is concerned with the visual and interactive elements of a website. This includes the overall aesthetics—the colors, typefaces, buttons, icons, and animations. A good UI is a good UI! It’s how the website looks and feels, along with how a user interacts with visual elements.
UX Design, however, is a much bigger picture that discusses the overall feeling of interacting with a product. It is the *entire* journey—is the website simple? Is the information easy to find? Is it logical to go through the steps involved in finishing it?
UX designers will do research and user testing to make sure that the website is useful, accessible, and enjoyable to interact with. While a good UI can make a website look good, a good UX is what makes a website effective and worthwhile to use.
Recommended: Full Stack Course Online.
Tools and Workflow in Web Designing
Web design software is a type of software that allows designers and developers to create websites. They range from a simple text editor to an all-in-one software that can create everything from visual designs to generated code, and in general we can categorize them into several types.
Visual Design Software
Often times the design process starts here, visual design software. These applications make it easy for the designers to create a high-fidelity mockup of the product, prototypes, or user flows without writing a single line of code.
- The most common visual design software is Figma, a web-based collaborative application that allows multiple designers the ability to work on the same design file simultaneously.
- Two other well-known applications are Sketch, a powerful Mac-only application, and Adobe XD, which can integrate well with other Adobe products.
Visual design software is important to the design process because it is how a website’s look, feel and user-interface (UI) can be generated before it gets to development.
Code Editors
When it comes to writing HTML, CSS and JavaScript, developers use code editors. Though you could write code in a simple text editor, modern code editors assist developers in being more productive.
- Code editors like Visual Studio Code (VS Code) can help a developer do things like write syntax highlighting, use code completion (IntelliSense) and have an integrated terminal. However, other well-known code editors are Sublime Text, and Atom.
- Code editors help developers write clean, efficient, organized code. There are hundreds of extensions to customize your code editor to meet any workflow.
Content Management Systems (CMS)
A Content Management System (CMS) is the answer for anybody looking to build their website and do not want to get deep into coding. A CMS allows a user friendly interface to manage web site content.
- A CMS will do the heavy code lifting for users. WordPress is the most commonly used CMS and hosts over 40% of the internet with other CMS examples these include: Joomla and Drupal.
- CMS are great for building blogs, e-commerce stores, and business websites quickly and cheap often using templates and plugins.
Web Desgin Workflow
A web design workflow is a structured process that a group carries out to make a new website, step by step from concept to launch and maintenance. Whilst some steps will change, a standard workflow guarantees clarity, efficiency, and, ultimately, a successful outcome.
Discovery and Planning
This initial phase is about identifying the basis of the project.
- The web team meets with their clients to set out the purpose of the website, identify the target audience, and list out key features.
- Competitor analysis, sitemap creation (blueprint of the pages), and identification of technical requirements also take place in this phase.
- This stage ensures a shared understanding of the scope of the project and lays the groundwork before any design thinking or development work commences.
Design
With a plan in place, the next phase of the workflow is designed for designing cultural and user experience.
- Designers start the visual design process with wireframing – low fi, stripped back layouts of what content and functionality will exist on each page.
- The designers can start to develop high fidelity mockups and perhaps prototypes using a design tool like Figma or Adobe XD.
This is the phase where the UI/UX principles help inform the look and feel, colour palette, typography, and interactive elements of the website.
Development
This is the coding phase.
- The front-end developers take the designs that have been approved to write the code for the parts of the website that are visible (i.e. structure – (HTML), style – (CSS), and interaction – (JavaScript)).
- The back-end developers will set up the server-side logic, databases, and APIs during this time as well.
- The developers will continue to check and make sure the website is functioning properly and will be responsive on a variety of devices.
Testing and Deployment
After the testing process, the website has to be put through one last round of quality assurance testing. They must check for bugs, broken links, cross-browser compatibility, performance issues, etc. The team may perform user testing and collect UX feedback.
After the final testing has been completed, the website will be deployed to a live server and will be available to the public on the web.
Maintenance and Support
The workflow for the development of a website does not end at launch. It will require ongoing maintenance to be useful.
Maintenance could include, but is certainly not limited to, monitoring performance, applying security updates, checking for bugs, and updating content. This last step ensures that the developed website is valuable for the long term.
A typical modern web designer has a set of tools that help them a lot.
- Code Editors: VS Code or Sublime Text are examples of tools that create a professional coding environment for writing code.
- They usually offer code highlighting and something called “code completion”, which are invaluable tools when it comes to code development.
- Design Tool: Designers will create a mockup and prototype of the website before the coding starts.
- Tools like Figmna or Adobe XD allow you to show design proposals and visual pieces, which is an essential part of the design process.
- Version Control: Git is a lifesaver for tracking where your code is at any point, as well as downgrading if you make a mistake.
- Git allows you to work with others and collaborate successfully.
Recommended: WordPress Course Online.
Performance and Accessibility in Web Designing
A website’s performance and accessibility are important to engage content for a broader audience base.
- Website performance is generally how fast a website loads. Improving website performance as a developer can be done in various ways, such as optimizing images, breaking up CSS or JavaScript files, and using a Content Delivery Network (CDN).
- Website accessibility means that people with disabilities can access the content of your website. This includes using proper HTML structure, creating alt text with images, and providing good contrast between colors.
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO) means making your website more visible to search engines, such as Google. Plain and simple, good web design is the basis for the basic SEO practices of using proper headings, creating good meta descriptions, and using clean URLs.
Conclusion
You’ve taken your first steps into the wonderful world of web design! You now understand HTML for structure, CSS for style, and are ready to create truly responsive designs. You have the basic knowledge to be a web designer and create something functional and beautiful! The learning does not stop here – it is an evolving and ongoing process.
You can deepen your understanding and knowledge of HTML and CSS and get hands-on practice with Javascript and framework skills by taking a larger, more formal web design course in Chennai. Get started by building your portfolio today and jump start your career in this exciting field!