Web design and web development often go hand in hand, however there is a certain difference between the two when it comes to providing services for a particular business. For some individuals it can be pretty obvious, while others may not fully understand what the real difference is. In this article we will explain how these two notions differ and what they have in common.
Web Design:
Generally web design stands for both usability of a website and its look and feel. Web designers use a variety of programs for design purposes, such as Adobe Master Collection Creative Suite 6, Adobe Illustrator CS6, Adobe InDesign CS6 and Adobe Photoshop CS6, as well as Gimp and Corel Draw, to build different layouts and other visual parts of the site.
Web design is a part of the website which will be faced by a client at some point. Therefore web designers are particularly involved in the interface of the site and the way clients interact with it – its navigation.
It is highly recommended to consider the website objectives of a customer. Then it is also important to move forward to information architecture and adjust a so called hierarchy, where the web design process can be guided through upon request. After that designers may begin with building wireframes and get to the design stage. They can apply a few fundamental design approaches to reach esthetically delightful layout that in addition has perfect user experience.
The Major Design Approaches:
- Balance: in web design elements are often referred to as heavy (dark colors) and light (lighter colors) ones. Utilizing a corresponding proportion of each element can be critical for reaching a balanced interface which is a very important issue for web design.
- Contrast: there is a color theory that says that contrasting colors are placed in the opposite to each other on the color wheel. In web design there is a number of areas, however, where contrast can be implemented. Web designers look at textures, shapes and contrasting sizes to determine and pay attention at particular parts of the site.
- Emphasis: should be used carefully and only in rare cases, otherwise the opposite effect will be in place – if most of the elements are highlighted, you will end up not emphasizing a single thing.
- Consistency: is a crucial part of web design. Clear and consistent navigation, for instance, allows for the visitors to have a great user experience on your website which will certainly pay you back with a lot of sales in the end.
- Unity: is about combining multiple elements of your website layout and its design in general.
Web Development
Web development generally means the backend of a website, in other words the programming part of its pages and how the pages interact with each other. Web development may range from building a simple static page containing plain text up to the most advanced web-based Internet apps, social network services and online businesses. Normally web development refers to a list of tasks that covers web design, content creation, client communication, server-side and customer-side scripting, web server and network security configuration, and eCommerce development. Web specialists, when talking about web development, usually mean non-design aspects of website creation, such as markup writing and coding.
Basic Web Development Hierarchy Consists of the Next Technologies:
- Customer side coding;
- Flash Adobe Flash Player – a universal browser plug-in ready for Rich Internet Apps (RIAs); Flex2 is deployed to Flash Player 9+, too;
- Ajax Asynchronous JS – provides new approaches of utilizing JS and other languages to enhance user experience;
- JS – a universal customer side platform for building and delivering Rich Web Apps which can run on a range of multiple devices. It is a so called dialect of ECMA Script language;
- HTML5 and CSS3 – the latest versions of HTML standard combined with CSS support major part functionality on the customer’s side provided by such frameworks as Silverlight and Flash;
- jQuery – a cross-browser JS library developed to simplify and quicken the customer-side HTML scripting;
- Microsoft Silverlight – MS browser plug-in which allows for animation, high-definition video playback, programmed utilizing XAML and .NET languages and vector graphics.
When small and medium-sized organizations search for web services providers who will create a website for them from scratch or re-design their existing site, they often don’t see the difference between Web design and web development. And even though there are jacks-of-all-trades who can do both a lot of companies choose to employ expert web designers who build website interface and then pass it on to web developers to finish the work with the site at the development stage.
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