The internet phenomena created a whole new market, with all new professions and specific technical abilities and skills required. One of the main new professions created is the web design. The one who works with web design is the web designer. The web designer works on webpages, websites and web applications.

We can compare it with a book, to understand it better. A webpage will be like the page of a book and the website will be the book itself. The first page of a web site is known as the home page.

In the beginning, the web design was based on simple HTML application. With the evolution of the internet, the web design also became more complex to achieve a new perspective in terms of communication.  

The first web site was published in 1991, by Tim Berners Lee, the man who did the first web design work. The ability to link hypertext was what basically they needed of a web design work, back then.

Today, macromedia flash dramatically changed the way of doing web design. It gave new interactivity possibilities to a web page. Also brand new tools like the Ajax or the Remote Scripting allowed new perspectives to the web design. Those new tools have advantages over flash. Flash requires a proprietary plugin and does not integrate many web browser features, such as back button.

A page is made of texts and images. As the web designer usually comes from visual arts studying background, he will be likely to push up web design to a more graphic oriented work. The danger besides is that the website can be too slow for downloading.

There will be a constant fight between web designer and the search engine optimization consultants (SEOs). While SEOs will be worried with the traffic generated and the advertisement sales, in other words, the profit, web designer will be worried with the artistic side of the web design work.

The search engine optimization consultants try to put the web site on top of the list in the searching engine’s results. On the other hand, the web designer must try to make the website look the cleaner possible, with all the information and image well organized.

Things like Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), integration technologies like server side scripting helped to make it easier and better the web design work.