Web Design and Web development are the terms that are used interchangeably by the laymen. However, if you ask a person, who deals with website creation, whether these two things are the same, you’ll hear a completely different answer. So, let’s take a closer look at these two notions and see, whether a web designer and a web developer do the same job.
Web Design and Its Part in Website Creation
All great things start with great ideas. These are web designers who are responsible for generating priceless ideas of unique website interfaces. Every web designer should have their right brain active and ideas leaping off their tongues.
What do web designers actually do?
They sit down with a cup of coffee and come up with the concept of a website. They think of the target audience and how to most effectively appeal to it: in some cases, they need a sleek monochrome website, in other cases, they need a bubbly and upbeat one. Then, they open Adobe Photoshop or other software they use and output their ideas, creating a detailed picture of a website front-end.If you have some experience with website templates, they frequently come with PSD files included. These files are the product of designer’s work. Web designers create a complete picture of a website, but elements are not functional there: buttons, images and links are not clickable, sliders don’t move, forms don’t work. This is the task of web developer to bring the website to live by implementing all the features depicted on the picture with the help of code.
The set of website designer skills includes advanced knowledge of Adobe Photoshop, deep understanding of latest web design trends and apprehension of modern web technologies. Web designer should work in close collaboration with web developer, as a designer can’t depict all he/she wants out of the blue – web designer should be able to implement all the elements, depicted on the template with the help of code.
Here is a product produced by a web designer – a PSD file of the website front page. As you can see, this is just a picture. After web developers gets this picture, it’s their task to create a full-fledged website/website template that the end user will pay for.
Web Development
Here we come to the point, when a web developer gets the PDS files. Their task is to implement what they see on the picture with the help of code. So, they start with creating HTML code of website pages that you can see if you use Firebug addon for Mozilla Firefox.
This is pretty much how a web developer sees the frontpage of the website. I bet, this is not as appealing as the visual part of it (see it below):
Although web development is not as creative as web design, a web developer should be a remarkable ‘computer linguist’. Web developers create markup and code using such languages as HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript and PHP. They stand behind implementing complex functionality of web stores, and bringing advances of modern web design, such as Parallax Effect, Ajax Search and Infinite Scroll to life. Web developers also know how to create a frontend look developed by a web designer using popular CMS, such as WordPress, Joomla and others. In this case, the end user will have more control over the website.
Actually, web developers not only deal with website creation, some of them deal with the things that are way more complex: they create CMS, secure online payment systems, web application, social networks, etc. For this purposes, they master more complex programming languages, such as Python, C++, Ruby, Java, etc.
Web development is a very vast area and there are a lot of things to learn for and we keep learning as we move forward in web development. Sometimes new frameworks, sometimes new language updates and so on. Good thing about this course is it covers almost all important areas and make you a full stack developer.
Do Web Design and Web Development Work Together?
A good canvas won’t ever appear without a pencil scratch, and a great, feature-laden website would never come to life without web designer generating the whole idea. Web design and web development go hand in hand to bring astonishing websites and website themes to end users.
On freelance market, the link between web design and web development is incarnated in professionals that call themselves web design and development hybrids. Such people are qualified enough to both conceive the concept of the website and to bring this concept to life with the help of code. They create hand-crafted projects and carry out the whole project themselves.
For WordPress designs, since creating a new theme each time is very costly and time consuming, many freelancers join WordPress theme clubs to service clients. These clubs let freelancers access and resell a whole collection of WordPress themes multiple times with no added cost.
Large web design corporations have teams of web designers and web developers that are responsible for different stages of website creation. In this case, each stage of this complex process is carried out by a professional team that has its own standards of quality. Only the best designs pass to developers. The developed code is clean, well-structured and corresponds to high quality standards. The website/website theme is thoroughly tested by a scrupulous team of testers. To see the level of quality that large template providers on the web are able to achieve, check these Web Development WordPress themes by TemplateMonster.
Conclusion
Web design and web development account for two stages of website creation. Web designers are experts of picturing modern and aesthetically pleasing website frontends that go in line with modern web design trends. Web developers are the people who incarnate this picture in HTML, CSS and JavaScript code.
Now, it’s time for you to let me know what you find more appealing: web design or web development? If you have any questions or comments, feel free to share them below.
Author Bio:
Allison is a professional writer and marketing specialist contributing for most famous vendors like TemplateMonster. Affiliate manager by day and a writer by night, she is creating many articles on business, marketing, design and web development. She loves working with WordPress and sharing her experience with the readers.
More Web and Mobile App Development and Related Articles:
- Learn Angular4 (formerly Angular2) – The Complete Guide
- Hybrid Mobile App Development with PhoneGap, AngularJS and Bootstrap
- Getting started with AngularJS
- Angular 2 – Beginner to Professional
- Getting started with Bootstrap
- Beginners Guide to jQuery Mobile App Development
- Exploring the Difference between Google Play Store and Apple App Store