Website Design
Web design is the design of web pages, websites and web applications using HTML, CSS and images.

Web design is part of starting a website (web development) which can include web server configuration, writing web applications and server security.

Liquid versus fixed layouts
Programmers were the original web page designers in the early 1990s. Currently most web designers come from a graphic artist background in print, where the artist has absolute control over the size and dimensions of all aspects of the design. On the web however, the Web designer has no control over several factors, including the size of the browser window and the size and characteristics of available fonts.

Many designers compensate for this by wrapping their entire webpage in a fixed width box, essentially limiting it to an exact pixel-perfect value, which is a fixed layout. Some create the illusion of liquidity by building the graphics for their webpage at a size larger than any current standard monitor size. Other designers say that this is bad because it ignores the preferences of the user, who might have their browser sized a specific way that they like best. These people propose a liquid layout, where the size of the Web page adjusts itself based on the size of the browser window.

There is a usability reason (rather than wanting control) for why a designer may choose a more fixed layout. Studies have shown that there is usually an optimal line width in terms of readability. One rule to appear from such studies is that lines should be between 40-60 characters long, or approximately 11 words per line. But users may choose their windows size and font selection to optimize other factors more important to them.

This decision of which style of layout to use is often made on a case by case basis, depending on the needs and audience of the website.

Dynamic Web Site Design
The traditional method of laying out web pages, HTML is static. There are two ways of delivering content dynamically:

Server-side
A web server, running special software, constructs an HTML page 'on the fly', according to the user's request and possibly other variables, such as time or stock levels.

Suitable scripting languages include:

ASP
ColdFusion
JSP
Perl
PHP
XSLT can be used translate data in XML format into HTML.

MySQL and PostgreSQL are popular free SQL databases, suitable for use with the above. They can be used to allow users, subject to password access if required, to update content.

Client-side
Client-side scripting works at the user's browser, and therefore should not be used for "mission critical' work, where the user's capabilities are not known – it is more suited to adding decoration and other ephemeral content. It is most often achieved through JavaScript.

Client side DHTML can pose major problems for computer accessibility and search engine optimization. Most software designed for assisting people with disabilities, and most search engine robots do not support client side DHTML.

If a web site's menus are built with JavaScript, it is usually impossible for search engines to find the pages listed in the menus, unless an alternative navigation scheme is provided elsewhere on the page.

Parts of this article have been extracted from Wikipedia.