Web site design requires good knowledge of the basic terms in the internet and web design contexts. Here is presented the main terms and principles that must understood in order to be able understand how web sites work.

Below are the main basic terms for web site design:

1. The WWW: basically, the internet is a group of web sites that are connected together and also to the users via the internet connection provider. When some one wants to access a site, he types the address of the site in the browser. The browser is a tool that receives the web pages and presents it to the user. The www letters indicate the protocol that is used to access the web pages. This protocol is called hyper text transfer protocol. The www is acronym for the World Wide Web.

2. The Website: the website is composed of a series of pages that for, the site. The pages that form the web site are just regular files that are stored on the computer but they are HTML documents. These HTML documents are grouped in folders and uploaded to the web server to form the web site. The site can have many departments and each department is represented by the folder.

3. The Audience: Many types of people are accessing the internet today because the internet users has been grown too large. Designing a web site that suits all types of people cannot be accomplished easily. This is because there are sites of people who like entertainment and there are sites for people that like cultural information and reading...etc

in order to design a site that reaches the most number of people, the web designer must make its design simple. This can be achieved by designing the site with just HRML and minimizing the JavaScript code and any other scripts inside the page.

4. Content: the content is the core of the web site. Every page is formed by the content inside it. The content is one of the most important things for the design of the web site. Many conditions must be met for the content in order to be acceptable for users. The most important is to be unique and with high quality. Also the web site owner must update it frequently to attract the visitors and the search engine robot.

5. Layout: the layout is the design of the web site. It refers to how the site is organized and linked together. It also refers to the text fonts and the graphics inside the site. The web designer must design carefully the layout because the layout alone can give value to the site as it reflects the overall appearance of the site. It must also made simple as much as possible for the search engines to be able to understand how the site is organized.

One important factor in the layout design is the loading time. The loading time is the time it takes to load one page for the site. The smaller the load time, the better the performance for the site. Smaller load time can increase ranking in the search engines as well as encourage people to open more pages inside the site.