What exactly is a website design?

The term web design actually differs from the term website design. A graphic artist will develop a web design into a website, which is a collection of electronic files that reside on a web server, or several servers and present the content and interative features of the website back to the end user in the form of a web page.

The recent improvements in the browsers' (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Google Chrome) compliance with W3c standards prompted a widespread acceptance and usage of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to position and manipulate web page elements and objects. Latest standards and proposals aim at leading to browsers' ability to deliver a wide variety of media and accessibility options to the client possibly without employing plug-ins.

There are typically two classifications for a web page, static or dynamic.

Static web pages don’t change content and layout with every request unless a human (web master/programmer) manually updates the website page.

Dynamic web pages adapt their content and/or appearance depending on end-user’s input/interaction or changes in the computing environment (user, time, database modifications, etc.) Content can be changed on the client side (end-user's computer) by using client-side scripting languages (JavaScript, JScript, Actionscript, etc.) to alter DOM elements (DHTML). Dynamic content is often compiled on the server utilizing server-side scripting languages (Perl, PHP, ASP, JSP, ColdFusion, etc.). Both approaches are usually used in complex applications.

With growing specialization in the information technology field there is a strong tendency to draw a clear line between web design and web development.