Web Design and Web Development: What’s The Difference?

Often used interchangeably, web design and web development are interrelated, but this is just a misconception that both terms mean the same. In this blog, we will clear your misconception and let you know about how these terms are highly different from each other. Both web designing and web development use different types of tools, methodologies, and technical skills to ensure the final delivered website is user as well as server-friendly.

Web Design

Web design refers to the creation of the structure and appearance of the website from the user’s perspective. It also focuses on the Graphical User Interface (GUI). In other words, how the website functions and appears to the user visiting it, is all part of web designing. However, it doesn’t include the software development procedure.

Web design focuses on the following aspects:

User Interface design
Graphic Design
Layouts
Texts and Symbols insertion
Color grading
Data engineering
Site structuring and formatting
Search Engine Optimization

All the aspects from the text, color, graphics to the user-friendly interface are covered in web designing. A good website combines all these aspects and conveys the information without causing any misinterpretation.

Web Designing Principles

Color combination

Visitors find websites very attractive that use an appealing color combination. If a wrong color palette is chosen for the website it might distract the visitors and will not make them stay on the website for a longer period. This principle also involves including white spaces that make a website’s content look more neat and clean.

Loading time

You would not like to spend time on any website that takes a lot of time to load. This principle of easy loading implements combining, compressing, and optimizing codes and image sizes so they can load much faster.

Smooth navigation

Smoother the navigation easier the operation. You might have noticed a website having easy navigation and more clickable buttons have more visitors.

Clear- Communication

The website’s content needs to be efficient enough to communicate clearly about the brand and its services. For this purpose, the information on websites needs to be properly organized without filling in unnecessary content.

Screen-compatibility

You might be using a smartphone, tablet, desktop, or laptop to open a website. Effective implementation of web designing involves design responsiveness along with screen size compatibility. It means the website needs to function properly irrespective of the device being used to open it.

Who are web designers?

It is the responsibility of a web designer to create an aesthetic website with a perfect blend of creativity and technology using web designing tools. The resulting website is considered successful when it ensures a user-friendly experience and has a lot of visitors.

Web designers are required to be familiar with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript but not much emphasis is given on the coding part in web designing. For your website to look more pleasing, you need to hire dedicated and experienced web designers who are well-versed with color theory, user experience, graphic designing, and web designing tools and software.

What is expected out of a web designer?

Needs to be digital-savvy
Must know effective graphic and logo designing techniques
Needs to be imaginative and creative yet logical while designing the blueprint or layout of the website
Must know the correct placement of all the website elements like images, texts, animations, symbols, white spaces, and buttons.
Must-know Search Engine Optimization

Web development

Whatever you see on a website is the mind of a web designer but how the website performs different functions to give you a rich user experience comes under web development. Processes that go behind the pleasant appearance of a website is web development. It involves the implementation of different programming languages and codes.

Web development takes into consideration the proper functioning of a website rather than its appearance. So it can be said that web development has more to do with the technical aspects than the creative aspects of a website.

Web Development Principles

Quality

High-quality websites are less prone to errors and security issues. Developers need to set goals that emphasize more on improving the quality of the result.

Reusable coding

It includes the implementation of codes and designs that can be reused and would require minimal changes whenever any update will be required.

High-speed loading

High page loading speed helps websites to increase their rank on the internet. For this purpose, web developers need to be aware of web application performance optimization. Since the attention span is declining because of the huge amount of data present online, this principle is the need of the hour for web development.

Who are web developers?

Web developers are software programmers that bring a website to life and make it function as per the layout designed by the web-designer. They build the core structure of the website with the use of coding. There are 3 types of developers in web development.

) Front-end Developer

A front-end developer’s job is to develop or create the User Interface for the website whose design has been made by the web designer. Their field of work includes typography, buttons, title, headings, texts, and images.

2. ) Back-end Developer

They deal with creating dynamic websites. Back-end developers majorly work on the core-coding procedure of the website development. Back-end development demands the usage of computer languages like C++, Python, Java, SQL, etc.

3. ) Full-Stack Developer

This set of developers are super-talented with knowledge of working in both front-end and back-end development. You can Hire Dedicated Team of Developers to work on different layers in web development if you can’t afford separate teams for back-end and front-end.

What is expected out of a web developer?

It is the job of a front-end developer to build such an interface that could load fast on any browser.
Build a user interface that takes less time to load.
Able to work on complex databases.
Create the exact website model that was designed by the web designer.
Deep understanding of Version control systems, API architectures, software frameworks, and testing of backend systems.
Fluency in programming languages like SQL, Python, Java, C#, and C++.

Web Design Vs. Web Development

Web Design	Web Development
Focuses on the facilities and smooth functioning of the website	Focuses on the visual aspect of a website
Client-side script	Server-side script
Front-end	Back-end
Demands creativity, innovation, and imagination	Demands technical and logical thinking
Languages used-HTML, CSS, Javascript	Languages used- Python, SQL, Java, C++,Ruby,.Net, and PHP
Tools-Photoshop, Sketch, Adobe Dreamweaver, WordPress, etc.	Tools- GitHub, Chrome developer tools, Opera Dragonfly, etc.

Conclusion

It is clear from the above description that there’s a lot of difference between web design and web development. We hope that now you understand when you need to hire web designers and web developers. If you need further guidance on web development and web designing, feel free to reach out to our dedicated team of experts at the comments section below.

Author Bio

Harikrishna Kundariya is a marketer, developer, IoT, ChatBot & Blockchain savvy, designer, co-founder, Director of eSparkBiz Technologies. His 8+ experience enables him to provide digital solutions to new start-ups based on IoT and ChatBot.