This article first appeared in issue 235 of .net magazine – the world's best-selling magazine for web designers and developers.
Approaching the design of a website by breaking it down into components is a clever way to tackle larger design issues, as well as accommodate functional limitations.
Most of us do this whether we are thinking about doing it strategically or not – for instance, if you’ve ever designed around a Facebook or Twitter widget because your client asked for it, you’ve been following this strategy. If you can embrace it in some scenarios, it can make the project run more smoothly and also improve the longevity of your design work. Modular design is not simply the use of design patterns, but you can incorporate them into your modular components. An example of a module you might want to use would be a horizontal tab-based navigation – the navigation block is the module and the tabular layout represents the pattern for the navigation design.