Difference Between Web Design and Web Development

Today we wanted to talk to you about difference between Web Designing and Web Development.

Web Design and Web Development, these are 2 separate roles in the website creation process.

Essentially web design involves creating what the website should looks like and how it should works, and web development involves building the design and bring it to life as a functioning website.

Lets get into more details on each of these things.

Web Design

Designing a website involves taking a brief information that a client wants displayed on a website and working out the best structure for it.

Web designers think a lot about the user’s journey through the site, and arrange the information in a way, that means they see the right content at the right time on their journey and they also think a lot about making that information really easy to consume.

That part of the design process is called user experience or UX as you may have see it referred to as, but designers are obviously also responsible for the visual look and feel of the site, and that’s called the user interface, or UI.

What a website looks like is really important because you have to make sure that the design ties in with the company’s brand, and also that the information is easy to read and consume, and it’s just nice to look at. So just like with graphic design, web designers think about typography, about color, positive-negative space, and other design principles.

There are many different pieces of software (Adobe Photoshop, Sketch, Pixlr, etc) out there which could be used by a website designer to design a website, but none of them are going to do the hard work, they’re all just tools to get your ideas down and create a visual file or mock-up to hand to a developer. And we call it a mock-up because it visually looks like a website, but it doesn’t function as one yet. Once the design is completed, that’s generally when the development side starts.

Web Development

As mentioned earlier, Web development involves taking the mock-up and bringing it to life through code so that it functions as a live website that you can put on the internet for people to use.

The base of a website is created using HTML, which organizes the structure of the site in code, and then CSS is used to style the HTML, that base structure, to make it match the colors and shapes of the design that the designer created.

There are many different programming languages and not every web developer is going to know them all. They’ll generally have their own few that they specialize in, but HTML and CSS are the basics that you start with. Developers are responsible not only for making sure that the site functions properly and matches the design, but also that the code is written cleanly, so it can load really quickly for the user. And usually developers will use a text editor to write and edit their code.

The bottom line is, Designers need more of an understanding of design principles and creativity to come up with the layout that is unique and answers the client’s brief and Developers focus more on logic-based thinking and an understanding of how code and technology works.