What is website design? What is the difference between web design and web development?
The terms web design and web development may look similar, but they are different in reality. Although the role of both web developers and web designers is to bring a website to life, their responsibilities, required skill sets, training and way of work are widely different.
What is Website Design?
Website design is merely the process of creating a website. The entire process may include several aspects including the creation of webpage layout, content generation and last but not the least, graphic design. The most important thing that is necessary for creating a website is a markup language, commonly known as HTML.
Web designers create web pages by using HTML tags that define the basis of the content as well as of the metadata of each page. Based on the preferences and client’s requirement, the web designers create the basic design or layout of the web pages, and the plan and appearances of a website are typically defined by using cascading style sheets, commonly called as CSS. To sum up, we can say that most sites are a combination of HTML and CSS. These are the main things that define how a page will look like in a browser.
Role of Web Designer:
As discussed, web designers are mainly responsible for creating the HTML of the website and defining the appearance of the site by using CSS. Some of the designers prefer to start coding the webpage from scratch by writing HTML and CSS. Also, there are others who prefer using code editors like Adobe Dreamweaver. The advantage of using this type of WYSIWYG editor is that it provides a visual interface for designing the webpage layout. Apart from that, a website can be designed by using a content management system like WordPress or Joomla. These types of CMSs offer a basic template for a, and this template can be used for the starting point of a new website. Web designers then add content and customize the layout by using any suitable web-based interface.
Importance of Graphic Design:
HTML and CSS can create the primary interface of a website, but the designers still need to create the images, banners, logos, and layout of the user interface. The individuals that produce these types of designs are called graphic designers, and graphic designing is an integral part of designing a website. Graphic designers mainly use programs like Adobe Photoshop to export the images in a format that can be implemented for the website design.
What is Web Development?
Web Development could refer to a single web page built with HTML and CSS that might contain a couple hundred lines of code. Or on the other end of the spectrum, it could refer to a website like Facebook that supposedly contains around 60 million lines of code
Difference between Web design and Web Development:
On the contrary to the web designers, web developers are mainly responsible for creating the code and looking after the functionalities of a website. In one word, web developers are concerned about the features of a site rather than the appearance of the website or application. Front end development includes several works like coding, CSS, JavaScript, etc and the backend development includes different programming language and framework like Ruby on Rails, Python. Apart from that web development also involves the understanding of databases, such as MySQL.
Regarding activities, the task of web design tends to be more creative and artistic, while web development is more analytical. However, with the ever-changing landscape, the role of both web designer and web developer can often become combined in the workplace. For example, many web designers understand the necessary web development concepts and vice versa. However, in most cases, companies hire dedicated members in both fields.