The front-end is the first thing that it is designed. It encompasses the look
and feel of a web site. This is probably the most established part of the web
site production process. Design has been around since Guttenberg printed his
first bible. Much of what has been used in print media (especially art
magazines) has transferred to the web.
Most well thought out web sites start off with sketches on paper. We like using
the big huge box of crayons, the one with the crayon sharpener built in. Most of
the colors in the "big box" are pleasing to the eye and are web
friendly. If you use begin paying attention to sites you'll notice that only a
few colors are actually used, 256 to be exact. Only about 100 of those won't
give you a headache when you look at them. On request we will give these early
designs to a client that wants to control the look and feel of their site. The
site, of course, never ends up looking like the early designs. The same idea and
concept is there but because of restrictions colors and whole images are lost.
This brings us to the next part of the front-end, the actual site creation. This
is what many people view as the most important, which is what separates a
professional looking site from an amateur one.
We create the images using products from across the board. Mainly, we stick to
industry standards like Photoshop and Illustrator. After getting the basic image
in terms of proportions and size we create the static HTML page.
This is the basic page you would see if you viewed the page source. This is one
of the most rewarding, most hated and most tedious part of the web design
process. Each browser displays a page differently. Since most users either use
Internet Explorer 4+ or Netscape 4.5 we cater to those two. Sometimes we build a
different site for each, trying to maintain the same layout.
That concludes the front-end section. Personal sites and some small business
sites stop here. While this maybe acceptable today, tomorrow any web site hoping
to attract and keep visitors is going to have a strong back-end.