Web Design And Web Development – The Differences
What does a web designer do? What is the difference between web development and web design? Are they the same with interchangeable terms that mean the same thing? What does web design involve?
The simple answer is that web development and web design are two entirely different things. In today’s post, we are going to take a close look at the roles and methods of a web developer and a web designer, and the difference between their services.
Web Design
In simple terms, web designers are individuals capable of transforming a story or an idea into an excellent design that is visually appealing. They build web layout to ensure excellent user experience throughout the website. They are responsible for designing the look and feel of the website. You can think of them as an architect who designs the house before the contractor starts building it. Similarly, a web designer creates the website layout. Once the layout has been created, a web developer comes in and develops it.
Web designers are often underrated. They have a tough job. Their designs need to ensure the best possible user experience. They need to build an environment where users feel welcome. They need to use all their creative skills to transform an idea into an enticing interface that is designed to catch the attention of the users. Every great website has a proper design strategy that is developed right from scratch in the early stages of the project.
Web designers use plenty of strategic techniques for their work. As a web designer, you won’t immediately begin creating a perfect website after thinking or reading about the specifications or the features needed in the website. As a web designer, you will begin by defining the scope of the website and the purpose for which the website is being built. You will begin by roughly sketching the designs in your head and then, you will put it on paper.
Once the sketching is done, web designers create mock-ups and wireframes. All this work then leads to creation of an intuitive and user-friendly design. Professional web designers use a variety of design components to create the whole website. Their final work will have a pixel perfect layout that will include all the webpages, typography, icons as well as all the other required features.
Web Designer – Main Roles
They use a variety of software packages including Sketch, Framer, or Adobe Photoshop for creating the final layout of a website.
They have excellent skills in logo design as well as graphic design.
They have skills to create an intuitive user experience and they excel at identifying the simplest approaches for achieving a desired function. Their work includes the images, buttons, layout as well as the overall format of the website.
Professional web designers always keep themselves abreast of the latest happenings in the web design world. They also keep their eyes on popular web design trends created by giant tech companies such as Facebook, and Google. It helps in making the interface and website environment familiar and easy to navigate as users are already familiar with the design.
Web designers also keep on top of the color palettes, branding, readability and typography of the website.
Web Development
Web developers are individuals who make use of a variety of software tools and web languages to convert the design created by a web designer into a live website. They create the actual functional website. It is important to mention here that web developers are categorized into subcategories including back-end and front-end developers.
In my opinion, the front-end developers act as a connection between the back-end developers and web designers as they know a bit of both which allows the front-end developer to create a fully functional website. Front-end developer is responsible for building the interface and the layout that is responsible for interaction between the user and website backend.
Three main languages are used by front-end developers including HTML, JavaScript and CSS. These languages allow a developer to build a complete website. These include creation of the main design layout, insertion of images, application of a variety of typography and font families, implementation of animations, form interfaces, flow of various webpages, and much more.
Back end developers are responsible for control of the server data and server requests. A back-end is required for a website in case it contains dynamic data. For example, dynamic data includes cases where users need to submit a form including personal data (creation of account), or saving an article for the blog page.
In short, if the website has a function where data needs to be saved and this data needs to be retrieved for use at a later stage, it will need database connection. Database connection requires direct connection to the web server itself. This is why, back end developers use various server languages such as ASP.net or PHP, and they also use various database query languages such as MySQL and SQL.
Web Developer – Main Roles
They build the actual interface required for user interaction with the website. Front-end developers use CSS, HTML and JavaScript to build the front-end interface.
Front-end developers typically use styling pre-processors, frameworks, and JavaScript libraries to speed up the pace of development.
Front-end developers give the markup design to back end web developers allowing them to create a dynamic website and to submit the required data to the server and databases.
Back end developers use various languages such as PHP and MySQL for creating the website backbone.
The back-end and front-end developers might use the same integrated development environments. The development environments are software tools that allow coding and building the website structure.
Many web developers like to use versioning tools for keeping a history of various builds. Versioning allows them to quickly revert back to a previous unbroken version, if needed.