The online world comprising the millions of pages containing information, images, videos and sounds make up the world of web design. It is relatively easy to set up your own website but a certain amount of skill is required to design webpages in a style and manner that will be usable across multiple devices, attractive to view and easy to navigate. To design a website you must first rent some space from an internet service provider (this is called website hosting), you can then have a site designed either by yourself or a professional website designer and make it accessible by giving it a domain name so that others can access your site. Web browsers can access this site by typing in the website url or address (domain name) – the unique name given to your website.
As with any visual material, people will not be encouraged to read it if it look unattractive and a whole industry has grown from this as people and companies look to design attractive and usable websites. There used to be much more technical expertise needed to create a website in the past as you had to be familiar with the HTML coding format used for storing information on the web. However, with the advent of packages such as Dreamweaver and CMS (Content Management Systems) options such as WordPress, you can now design your own website relatively easily.
For those that wish to pursue a career in website design, there are many starting options available. The best way to start is by learning the fundamentals of coding in HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) and CSS (Cascading Stylesheets) as these will be useful even if using software such as Adobe Dreamweaver or Website builders such as WordPress. Other skills that will be useful is basic image editing and learning which image formats can be used most effectively, coding with Javascript and FTP (File Transfer Protocol) for transferring your website files onto your website.