Nevertheless, a solid development cycle and formal design techniques can help developers substantially. They lead to better Web-sites, which means better to read, to navigate and to maintain. In the next section, the current approaches to hypermedia design are described and the need for new concepts is explained. We refine these needs in the following section and briefly show the basic W3DT design primitives and their use. W3DT and other Approaches to Hypermedia Application Design Hypermedia design has to consider many different aspects as for example information structuring, navigational design and interface design.
Database design is a field very closely related to hypermedia design.
Many formal hypermedia design methodologies are based on well defined database design methods like the Entity-Relationship model. In database design, models play a crucial role to express the intrinsic application oriented data semantics. On the other hand, practitioners tend to draw the nodes and links of their hypermedia applications in a relatively straightforward manner in order to convert linear text into hypertext structures. The Web supports unstructured information like multimedia news services as well as interfaces to databases or other kinds of structured information. Thus a design method for WWW-based information systems requires representation of both.