DES1: Browsers & Platforms
A web browser is a software application for retrieving, presenting and traversing information resources on the World Wide Web. An information resource is identified by a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI/URL) that may be a web page, image, video or other piece of content. Hyperlinks present in resources enable users easily to navigate their browsers to related resources. Although browsers are primarily intended to use the World Wide Web, they can also be used to access information provided by web servers in private networks or files in file systems.
DES2: Graphic Design
The process of visual communication and problem-solving using one or more of typography, photography and illustration. Graphic designers create and combine symbols, images and text to form visual representations of ideas and messages.
DES3: Information Architecture
The structural design of shared information environments; the art and science of organizing and labelling websites, intranets, online communities and software to support usability and findability; and an emerging community of practice focused on bringing principles of design and architecture to the digital landscape.
DES4:Security & Privacy
Security includes an organization’s strategy and provisions for ensuring the security of assets and network traffic, through both hardware and software means. Network security is protection of the access to files and directories in a computer network against hacking, misuse, and unauthorized changes to the system. Enforcement includes analyzing traffic flows and ensures confidentiality, integrity, and availability of systems and information.
DES5: Identity and Branding
The brand of an organization, service, or product is the personality shaped by the perceptions of the audience. Brand includes fonts, logo, color, slogan, etc. but is also the “corporate image.” Everything a company does, owns, and produces should reflect the values and aims of the business as a whole. It is the core idea that makes up the company and drives its behavior, what it believes in, and why it exists.
Identity is built around the various visual devices used to portray the brand, usually with a set of guidelines around how the identity is applied through various mediums, being kept coherent across all of them, which in turn allows the brand to be recognizable.
DES6: Localization & Internationalization
Localization refers to the adaptation of a product, application or document content to meet the language, cultural and other requirements of a specific target market (a locale). In addition to the user interface or documentation, it may also relate to numeric/date/time formats, use of currency, keyboard usage, symbols, icons, colors, varying legal requirements, and more.
Internationalization is the design and development of website content that enables easy localization for target audiences that vary in culture, region, or language. This includes enabling code to support local, regional, language or culturally related preferences, including date and time formats, local calendars, number formats and numeral systems, sorting and presentation of lists, handling of personal names and forms of address, etc.
DES7: Accessibility
Web accessibility refers to the inclusive practice of removing barriers that prevent interaction with, or access to websites, by people with disabilities. When sites are correctly designed, developed and edited, all users have equal access to information and functionality.