What is Web Design?
Web Design is the process performed by a web designer to create a website.
What is a Website?
A website is a collection of web pages that can be found on the web.
A website must have a defined configuration to appear on the web. In reality, the website is like a library and the website is a book cataloged in that library. In that sense, the search engines Google, Bing, Yahoo!, Baidu, Yandex, and DuckDuckGo have a stake in the indexing (cataloging) work, with Google Search dominating with more than 92% of the market share.
There are certain guidelines that each website must follow to be ranked on a search page. Those guidelines are summarized in Picking a website designer and A good Website Design.
What is a Search Page?
How a website appears on the web?
There are already about 2 billion indexed websites on the web in 2022. Beyond the search page number 3 or 4, a website is invisible.
The huge job of “indexing” the web is done in several steps, which are theoretically these:
Discovering
Crawling
Indexing
Ranking
Maintenance
For a website to pass those steps it requires a strict configuration, some are included in what is known as SEO or SEO Optimization. The participation of search engines is more important in the first 3 steps, and the last 4 are more defined by the web design.
Figuratively, a search page resembles a wave that rises every time you enter a keyword in the search engine.
The websites that appear first, i.e. on the crest of the wave, are the ones that have passed all the tests and remain ranked in those positions. It is important to emphasize that the first positions are temporary, although in some cases there are some websites that remain very stable due to what is explained here. In that sense, each wave brings fresh information (not live) from the library, which is updated with each indexing process (once a week for example).
Goal of a Website
The main goal of a good website design is conversion. The word conversion implies website analytics, which is necessary to keep a website on the crest of the wave. You set a goal (inform, sell, or gather information for example), define a SEO strategy, and track the conversion performance through the website analytics.
Web Design Summary
Web design is more like a documentation process than a process of creating a graphic design.
Only a collection of web pages that are indexed and ranked in the search engine can be called a website. Furthermore, a good website design is a website that converts.
Visual design becomes secondary to ranking, which means that the website appears at least on the first pages of the search engine. However, graphic design is essential in the second stage, after the user clicks on the link shown in the search engine, then the user experience becomes the protagonist and gives the baton afterward to the conversion. So, to the 5 stages mentioned above, we can add user experience and conversion so that a website can be called a website and web design can be called web design.
