THE WEB DESIGN GUIDEBOOK

THE WEB DESIGN GUIDEBOOK is aimed at providing tips and insights for website owners, marketers and those passionate about web design. A must-read for anyone interested in getting the most from your website’s appearance and usability.

Learn web design styles and best practice techniques from award-winning WordPress web designers, Michael Paragon and Jon Pedlow. – Founders of WPHiveHosting.com.

Introduction by Michael Paragon

If you own or manage a website, or are just passionate about web design, this is a very handy reference guide to own. You will learn a variety of web design styles, how best to use them, and the science & psychology behind the size of everything online.

Since the first websites appeared on August 6, 1991, web designers have been on a quest for excellence. The earliest websites were created in HTML and it was not an easy to task to make them fashionable looking.

In the early 1990’s web programmers had to write tedious lines of code to create a web page.

I watched the internet unfolding in the mid-1990’s while I studied art and graphic design.  I was also developing my own line of artist materials for Paragona Art Products, so I was too focused on products and packaging to think much about web design. That is until I needed a website myself.  

There was not too much web design going on back then. Websites were rudimentary mostly containing lists and links to information. That all changed very fast, and by mid-1990’s commercial websites began to explode onto the web. And all you needed was a telephone connection!

Research on the internet in the 1990’s was slow and difficult to do. Slow connections to web pages, pages timing out, it’s no wonder really considering telephone modems had a top speed of 56 kbps (kilobits per second). If you were in a hurry, you’d be better off getting into the car and heading over to your library to find information.

No one was thinking much about web design, but that was all about to change. Within a few short years, it would be possible for anyone to build their own website.

Early web pages resembled newspaper or magazine front page layouts, so designers intuitively set out to copy the same journalistic format. In fact, many of the fundamental rules used in newspaper and magazine page layouts are used today as a foundation for modern web design — “modern” being a relative term in internet years, considering the world wide web was launched in 1991 and is still in its infancy.

Today, website design has reached unimaginable levels of sophistication, thanks to ongoing research and breakthroughs in web technology. Fiber optic internet connections are now capable of reaching speeds surpassing 505 Mbps (megabits per second).

Today’s web designers need to become masters of UX (User Experience), by developing a friendly UI (User Interface) that guide users to important areas of a web page or website. UI enhances the user experience by simplifying how users relate to and access information.