Web design encompasses a variety of disciplines and skills in the creation and maintenance of websites for consumers. The various fields of web design now include user interface (UI) design; visual content creation; web graphic design and also web page authoring, which includes both proprietary and standardised code; and search engine optimisation. Although web designers can be grouped into one or two types, they are usually grouped to cover the aspects of web design that overlap in an attempt to form a broad “web group”. In practice, however, there is often considerable inter-mixing of these disciplines and skills. It is this blending that gives rise to web design professionals, who can produce very impressive websites.
Emotional design is the application of aesthetic standards to web design. This can take the form of creating user interfaces and other aesthetic appearances that reflect a business’s values. Web designers work primarily in either a visual style, where everything is done with a visual flair, or a non-designer style, where aesthetics are ignored in favour of usability. Both of these styles have distinct limitations, and it is often the case that a mixture of the two is required to create a website that appeals to all types of people. There is no general rule about what type of person should produce a website, as every person has their own ideas about what looks good and what does not. However, one of the most common traits of successful web designers is that they have an eye for what matches people’s emotions and interests.
Web designers often use the tools of graphic design to help them communicate the visual aspects of a website. Graphic design is a process of applying visual effects, such as colours, to both text and images to create a strong visual impact. Many web designers choose to concentrate only on the visual aspect of a website, leaving the technical issues to be handled by other web designers, and using a variety of templates to construct the layout of a site. However, many successful websites also contain some amount of written content – both to provide information to the users, as well as to encourage interaction among the site visitors.