In this computer age a basic or a detailed knowledge of web design helps the user or browser in using, handling, applying a computer immensely. Web design is the designing and graphical presentation of content shown on the Internet in the form of Web sites and other Web applications using many different forms of media. In software engineering a web application or webapp is an application that is accessed with a web browser over a network such as the internet or the intranet. Web applications are used to implement web mail, online retail sales, online anchors, wikis, discussion boards, webblogs, MMORPG (Massively multiplayer online role-playing game) and many other functions.

A markup language combines text and extra information about the text. The basic design of most pages on the Web use HTML, CSS, and the latest form of language, XHTML. Hypertext Markup Language, is the best known markup language for the creation of web pages. It provides a means to describe the structure of text-based information in a document — by denoting certain text as headings, paragraphs, lists, and so on — and to supplement that text with interactive forms, embedded images, and other objects. HTML is written in the form of labels (known as tags), surrounded by less-than (<) and greater-than signs (>).

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) In computing, is a stylesheet language used to describe the presentation of a document written in a markup language. Its most common application is to style web pages written in HTML and XHTML, but the language can be applied to any kind of XML document, including SVG  (Scalable Vector Graphics) and  XUL (XML User interface Language).

Extensible Hypertext Mark up Language (XHTML) is a mark up language that has the same depth of expression as HTML. It also conforms to XML syntax. The Extensible Mark up Language (XML) is a general purpose markup language. Its primary purpose is to facilitate the sharing of data across different information systems, particularly via internet.

Many sites today also integrate various forms of dynamic, interactive content using e-Commerce, and server-side languages such as PHP and ASP.
e-Commerce- Electronic Commerce is exactly analogous to a market place on the internet. Electronic Commerce (also termed as EC, e-commerce, eCommerce or ecommerce) is primarily concerned with the distributing, buying selling, marketing and servicing of products or services over electronic systems such as internet and other computer networks.

Hypertext Preprocessor (PHP), a reflective programming language, originally designed for producing dynamic web pages, is used mainly in server- side scripting, but can be used from a command line interface or in standalone graphical application. ASP (Active Server Page) is Microsoft’s server-side script engines for dynamically-generated web pages. ASP websites are made easier by various built-in objects.

Web design contrasts with Web development, which includes Web server configuration, writing Web applications, and server security.