Website design and development is based upon a range of tools, the most notable of which are Hyper Text Markup Language or HTML to its friends, and Cascading Style Sheet or CSS.

HTML and CSS are programming languages, as the names give away to those that are more observent than sane, HTML controlls what is displayed on a webpage in what order, it lists the contents of a page, a typical example follows the below guidelines:

Head - The page header, contains managerial information like the page name, standards used (w3.org) and calls other information into the site, like Cascading Style Sheets.

Body - contains the site, and will have CSS styles applied to it to make things inside it apear nicely.

Page Header - as opposed to the header described above this is visible and typically contains the site logo.

Navigation - a system for navigation eg menu (of links, taking the user to other pages of a simialr if not identical form).

Content - the container into which almost all of the site will go, in some cases it can be split in to colums like some of the pages on our site.

Heading 1 - the page heading would be put in here.

Paragraph - the site main content would be entered here.

Footer - another menu, and other minor links or information, increasingly this space is used to link to social bookmarking sites like face book, twitter and the hundreds of others, an example of this is the links at the base of this page.

CSS should be kept in a separate document even though it can be used in an HTML document, the CSS file will be referred to by the HTML file and so loaded into the users browser usually after the HTML has loaded.

CSS describes how each of the containers listed above and any others added in between appear. It will also apply the styling to any child containers, so for example when writing a CSS file for the above HTML it might apear as:

Head - Page size, Background eg: an image or colour.

Body - Font styles (Font color note the American spelling, font size ) of all text unless set otherwise, in a child container eg Heading 1

Page Header - the logo, top menu positioned to the right, top menu link colour

Navigation - menu direction, menu look (eg background image), menu position, and spacing

Content - padding, page layout

Heading - this describes the heading size, colour, background color (or image) etc.

Paragraph - position, font size, font (font family eg Arial, sanserif),

Footer - same as navigation.

These two files will be read by your browser and depending on their size and quality will allow the page to load faster or impeade the loading of the page. There are a number of diffrent programming languages each bringing diffrent possibilities to website design and development.