Many people who want to work as web designers believe that their skills in Photoshop will be enough to land them a job. While it is definitely important for individuals in the field to have solid design skills, knowing how to use web design languages can provide them with a number of advantages. In addition to making them more desirable as an employee because companies will not have to hire both a designer and a programmer, knowing how to use these languages will give people a more thorough understanding of how the front end side of web development works. While people do not necessarily have to master all of these languages, being familiar with them will make designers better at what they do.
HTML
HTML is at the core of almost all websites. The language basically created the Internet as it is today, and it is very simple to learn. HTML is essentially a series of commands known as tags that are inserted into a plain text file. These tags organize the page’s content and create its basic format. People can use tags to add music, images, lists, tables, links and a number of other things to a web page. They can also be used to insert comments and meta tags that people do not see when they load the page in a browser.
HTML documents all contain three main parts that include the body, title and head. The body is where all of the elements that are displayed when people visit the page are located. This is where the vast majority of the work is done, and the section can have additional tags. The title portion contains the name of the site that is displayed in the browser tab when a person visits the page. The head section is where important keywords and information that identifies the page is placed.
While many people believe that HTML needs to be coded from scratch, this is not necessarily true. There are graphical HTML editors available that function similar to word processing programs. People can manipulate page elements without the need to write much code, and these can be particularly useful for designers who are just getting familiar with HTML.
CSS
CSS is an acronym for Cascading Style Sheets, and it was created to address a very specific problem with web design languages. While HTML was designed to format web pages, it was not until HTML 3.2 that the language was able to control how things were presented on the page in more than a very basic way. CSS was invented to separate page design from the content and give people a much wider range of control over how things are presented.
In addition, using CSS provides people with a number of benefits. All of the page design elements are controlled from style sheets, and this makes it easy to troubleshoot problems and create layouts quickly. It can also lead to faster page download speeds because it lightens page loads. The browser only has to download the CSS rules once, and they are then cached and used every time the page loads. In addition, CSS is very efficient to design and update. With the content totally separate from the design, it is easy to create rules and apply them to all of the elements in a website, and this is particularly useful when changing things like the design of an entire site.
JavaScript
JavaScript is a programming language that is used to make web pages interactive. It does this by running scripts in the browser that interact with the server to perform tasks. The language is used in the majority of websites today, and it can easily be utilized to create dynamic and interesting interfaces. It is also a particularly easy language to learn considering how powerful it is.
JavaScript can be used to do things like link together web content and applications, open new pages and modify forms utilizing a system of control structures, operators and variables. It extends the functionality of HTML and can turn websites into interactive tools. In addition, JavaScript can be placed directly in HTML documents, and this makes it easy to integrate with any page.