In the early days, when the digital world was still in its nascent stages, if you asked someone what is the difference between web design and web development? You would probably get a reply saying that web designers design and development is all about coding. In reality, it is not completely true. Web design is much more than only designing and web development is not only coding. Both Web design and web application development have their specified roles and are not completely interchangeable.
Nowadays many web companies, are using these terms alternately to describe the services they provide. However the fact is that both these terms refer to two fundamentally different aspects, important for building a website. Successful website building requires using both unique skill sets. It is very important that you know the difference between web design and web development, if you are planning to build your website. Let us help you understand the difference:
What is Website Design?
Web designing involves transforming an idea or a story, into a visually alluring design. This design layout is then used for building the user experience for the website. Web design involves creating and designing the website’s look and feel. Similar to an architect who designs and draws a plan of the house before building it, a web designer also designs a model layout of the website before a web developer starts coding and developing it.
Web designing is not simple, it is very difficult to integrate the various aspects of the website and create a welcoming, user friendly environment. Web design involves writing a plan to develop a usable interface design. The role of a web designer is as important as the developer, as without an appealing interface and wonderful user experience, the development cannot be well experienced and appreciated by the end user.
A perfect website cannot be created immediately after reading or understanding the specifications defined. Web designers need to first understand the scope, the purpose of the website. They will then roughly visualize the designs and draft or sketch the design. From draft sketching they move to wireframes, mock-ups, and then arriving at the final design. Some of the areas covered under web design are:
- Graphic designing
- Logo designing
- Web layout designing
- Placement of call-to-action buttons on the website
- Branding
- Working on Wireframes, mock-ups, and storyboards
- Deciding the Color palettes
- Typography
Web design designs the face of the website, it designs and work on what the user will see on their computer screen or mobile device. With a balanced use of colours, images, typography, layouts etc. web design helps in bringing a digital experience to life. If you’d like to learn more about web design, colors, digital experiences — Udemy courses on web design are a great starting point.
What is Web Development?
If web designers are responsible for designing what the users get to see on their screen, then web developers are the ones who are responsible in turning these designs into a live fully functional website. Web development involves using various web languages and software tools for developing and building a website.
There are 2 types of web development, front-end and back end. Front-end developers are the bridge between the web designers and back-end developers They work on three main development languages; Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), and JavaScript (JS). These languages help in developing a full-fledged website, right from designing the main layout, to inserting images and videos, using different types of typography and fonts, form interfaces, and more.
Back-end development involves controlling the data and requests from the server. If a website contains dynamic data, it will require full fledge back-end services. For example websites which require users to submit their personal data for creating an account, need to save this data and make it accessible for a later stage. Hence the website also requires a database connection. These database connections can be directly connected to the server itself. Back-end development involves using server languages like PHP or ASP.NET. It also involves writing database queries by using languages like SQL or MySQL.
Now that we have a clearer understanding of the difference between web design and web development, we know that both play an important role in web building, and that one cannot exist without the other. To sum up, the web designers need to understand the design principles and creatively come up with unique layouts and web developers need to focus more on logic-based thinking and understand coding and how the technology works.
Velocity Consultancy is a professional Web Designing and Development Company providing comprehensive and cost effective web solutions for a wide range of website design & development services. We are dedicated in assisting small to medium sized businesses establish an online presence. We help our clients in harnessing the wide reach of the Internet by designing and developing web solutions which will help them in marketing their products to a larger audience.