As you plan for web design Santee, you have to think about the three layers of web design. Every website that is created combines structure, style and behavior. These are the three layers of a web design. Experienced web designers liken web development to a three-legged stool. The three legs are structure, style and behavior. A website will not perform efficiently if it lacks any of these three layers. Let’s take a look at the three layers.
Structure layer
This is the layer made up of the underlying HTML code. Solid HTML is the same as the foundation of a house. The rest of a website is built around the solid foundation created by HTML. The structure area is where the content of your website is stored. The HTML structure can be made up of images and text and will also include hyperlinks that the visitors use to navigate a website. All this has to be coded in standards-compliance HTML5 and includes images, text and multimedia.
Your web designer Santee will represent every aspect of your website’s content in the structure layer. What this means is that visitors who have turned off JavaScript or whose browser cannot view CSS will still be able to see and use the functionalities of your website.
Styles layer
This is the layer that dictates how the structured HTML document will appear to a visitor. It is defined by CSS. CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) contain stylistic instructions for documents on how they should be displayed in a browser. The style layer includes the media queries that change a website’s display depending on the screen size and device. The visual styles reside in external style-sheet. Multiple style-sheets can be used. It is, however, good to note that every CSS file will require an HTTP request in order to fetch it. What this means is that the overuse of style-sheets will impact the overall performance of your website.
Behavior layer
This is the layer that causes a website to be interactive. It is what enables web pages to respond to the actions of a user as well as change depending on the set conditions. The language used in the behavior layer is JavaScript. It is also not uncommon for a web designer Santee to use PHP and CGI.
The behavior layer is the layer that is activated directly in a web browser. The layer is used to interact with the Document Object Model. Creating valid HTML is crucial for Document Object Model interactions in behavior layer. To optimize speed, use external script files when building in behavior layer.
As you can see, web design Santee takes more than what visitors can see. This is why you need to hire an experienced web designer to help with the development.
