Read the text. Interview: Website Designer

Interview: Website Designer

Many companies now have a website to advertise their goods and services and provide information to their customers. It is therefore becoming important to have a website as good as your competitors.

A lot of work has to be done to create a good website. The individual webpages have to be created using a language called hypertext markup language or HTML, and the individual webpages have to be linked together using hyperlinks. It takes a combination of technical knowledge and artistic skill to make webpages look good. The layout of a sophisticated webpage might contain a combination of text, graphics, animation, and other multimedia elements.

Rather than creating a website yourself, you can pay a web designer to create the site for you. The web designer must first find out what information you want to provide on the website, and the target audience he or she is designing for. Depending on this information, the designer will decide what kin of information should be displayed on each webpage, and how these pages should be linked. Navigation icons may be displayed on each webpage to make it easier for users to move to different parts of the website. Every page must have a link that will let users move to another page.

However, if too many links are needed to get to a page, the user may decide it is not worthwhile. Pages have to be kept short enough so that the user does not have to do a lot of scrolling. Remember that it will take time and cost money to keep the website up to date.

Multimedia features make the page look nicer and more interesting, but they take longer for the user to browse. Some multimedia features also require the user to install additional programs known as add-ons, which work in the browser to enable the multimedia features to be used. Each webpage has to be downloaded from the web server before it can be displayed on the screen. It is therefore advisable to divide information into small sections to suit the display screen, save downloading time, and simplify printing. The first page of a website should be simple and tell the reader who the website owner is. If links to other websites are included, people are more likely to come back to your site.

It should be noted that Microsoft Explorer and Netscape Navigator are the two most common browsers. Users with less sophisticated browsers may fint it takes a very long time to download graphics. If the site depends on graphics, this can be very frustrating. Good website designers offer text alternatives.

Website designers like the one interviewed in this unit are experienced in creating websites that take all of these factors into consideration.

2 Answer the following questions:

1 What language is to be used to create individual web-pages?

2 Does making web-pages require technical knowledge and artistic skill?

3 What can the layout of a sophisticated web-page contain?

4 What is the first step of web-designer to create a web-page?

5 What is the function of navigation icons displayed on each web-page?

6 What makes the web-page look nicer and more interesting