Web Design Issues

Anything which requires collaboration usually incurs conflict between differing methods or goals during design. A website design is a good example of this.

The first issue is lack of clear communication between parties. In the early stages of website creation, there wasn’t the same collaboration between web designs and larger advertising campaigns, social networks, or intranets as there is today. Web pages were static brochures and were usually pretty disconnected from the larger project, many web pages are still this way if the vision of the project isn't communicated properly to your web designer.

In order to connect to the larger project, special design considerations are necessary, but they are often overlooked. The reasons for this include lack of leadership, too much leadership, lack of understanding and technical knowledge as well as knowing how to integrate the funtionality you need into a stylish website. What resulted was unhealthy competition or compromise between departments and under utilised web pages.

Another issue is liquid vs. fixed layouts. A web designer has no control over the website when it is on the web. The factors causing this are the size of the browser window, the actual web browser being used, the input devices such as the mouse or touch screen, and the size of the website, its design as well as the fonts which have been installed on their own computers.

Some designers like to control the appearance of the on screen elements and they do this by using specific width designations, using HTML and through the use of table based designs with CSS. When the text or image and the layout of the design do not vary amongst browsers, this is called fixed width design and advocates of this argue the need for a designers need for precise control.