As a small business owner, I recognize the need to hire a cost effective small business website designer. But this area is new to me. What options are available? What type of website do I need? This website includes information about business website design and recommendations to benefit the small business owner.

What is entailed in making a website? In summary, web design is the skill of creating presentations of content (usually hypertext or hypermedia like online video) that is delivered to an end-user over the Internet, by way of a Web.

The intent of an effective business e-commerce website designer is to create a profitable web site. Simply put, this is a collection of electronic documents and applications that reside on a web server and present content and interactive features/interfaces to the end user in form of Web pages once requested. Such elements as text, bit-mapped images (GIFs, JPEGs) and forms can be placed on the page using HTML/XHTML/XML tags. Displaying more complex media (vector graphics, animations, videos, sounds) requires plug-ins such as Adobe Flash, QuickTime, Java run-time environment, etc. Plug-ins are also embedded into web page by using HTML/XHTML tags.

Improvements in browsers' compliance with recognized web best practices prompted a widespread acceptance and usage of XHTML/XML in conjunction with Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to position and manipulate web page elements and objects. Latest standards and proposals aim at leading to browsers' ability to deliver a wide variety of content and accessibility options to the client possibly without employing plug-ins.

Typically web pages are classified as static or dynamic:

* Static pages don’t change content and layout with every request unless a human (web master/programmer) manually updates the page. A simple HTML page is an example of static content.

* Dynamic pages adapt their content and/or appearance depending on end-user’s input/interaction or changes in the computing environment (user, time, database modifications, etc.) Content can be changed on the client side (end-user's computer) by using client-side scripting languages (like JavaScript). Dynamic content is often compiled on the server utilizing server-side scripting languages (Perl, PHP, ASP, JSP, ColdFusion, etc.). Both approaches are usually used in complex applications like databases or ecommerce catalogs.

Web design is a kind of graphic design intended for development and styling of objects of the Internet's information environment to provide them with high-end consumer features and aesthetic qualities. The offered definition separates web design from web programming, emphasizing the functional features of a web site, as well as positioning web design as a kind of graphic design.

The process of designing web pages, web sites, web applications or multimedia for the Web may utilize multiple disciplines, such as animation, authoring, communication design, corporate identity, graphic design, human-computer interaction, information architecture, interaction design, marketing, photography, search engine optimization and typography.

* Markup languages (HTML, XHTML and XML)

* Style sheet languages (CSS and XSL)

* Client-side scripting (JavaScript)

* Server-side scripting (PHP and ASP)

* Database technologies (MySQL)

* Multimedia technologies (Flash )

Web pages and web sites can be static pages, or can be programmed to be dynamic pages that automatically adapt content or visual appearance depending on a variety of factors, such as input from the end-user, input from the Webmaster or changes in the computing environment (such as the site's associated database having been modified).

With growing specialization within communication design and information technology fields, it’s very important to find the best small business website designer.