When visually designing a website, you may consider of a few things before actually opening Photoshop and creating a mockup:

• What problem am I trying to solve?
• What do I want to communicate to my users?
• How can I make my designs intuitive and easy to understand?
• What tools allow me to achieve this goal?

A visual designer needs to consider some of the issues above to enable users to visit your website without hitting any obstacles that may prevent them from achieving their goals on the site. The goals may vary from buying a book to leaving feedback on a forum, but should be anticipated and planned for in the initial design phases.

An HTML developer has a similar role when it comes to coding a website. The developer must consider obstacles that they may inadvertently create for the user if they don’t consider who visits their website or how they intend to use it. Some users, such as those using screen readers, will depend on the HTML code itself as much as other users depend on the visual layout, so the HTML developer has to consider what they are trying to communicate to the user through the use of correct HTML.

The developer should begin to imagine the semantic meaning of the HTML document and what code is going to communicate this to the end user. For different reasons, there are many users (for example, the visually impaired, search engines or mobile phone browsers) who will just read the code of your websites, rather than focus on the visual design of them. This is why it is important to pay attention to the semantics (or meaning) of how you develop your websites.

If you decide on a consistent, logical standard of how to communicate this meaning in your HTML, then the documents become universally easier to understand and navigate. A visual designer may create consistency throughout a design by re-using components such as icons, color schemes or grid-based layouts. An HTML developer can achieve the same kind of consistency through other toolsets available to them. This consistency and meaning is what we are trying to achieve by giving our HTML semantic meaning.

Read Scott’s post tomorrow on how to implement semantic HTML on your website…

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 2nd, 2007 at 5:13 am and is filed under Web Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.