For those who doesn’t know, we are going to explain as well as we can, the difference between web design and web development.
They might seem to be the same thing but in reality they aren’t so lets break apart what and how.
Web Design, involves the basics of a website design which includes:
The well known HTML code (Hypertext Markup Language - the main programming language of the web),
CSS for styling and layout (Cascading Style Sheet),
Graphics to make up the look and feel of the website itself.
A professional web designer can create a very pleasant website, which can take your breath away with the quality graphics and a well-balanced layout.
The next step is the functionality of the website and that’s where a Web Developer steps in.
A web developer is the one responsible for how the website performs based on the user / visitor interaction, making sure the right context is displayed at the right time and makes the website responsive and sticky.
I have seen very large businesses having a very poorly performing websites which instead attracting customers, drives them away.
As a website is the business image on the World Wide Web (www), a poorly performing site could mark your business as unprofessional.
Is that what you are looking for? I don’t think so.
A web developer skills involves:
Server Side Scripting Language (PHP, ASP, ASP.NET, etc)
Client Side Scripting Language (JavaScript)
SSI (Server Side Include)
Database Design(MySQL, MS SQL, etc.)
CMS (Content Management System) which allows the owner of the website to keep the content up to date.
An e-Commerce website is a great example.
If you have 1000 products that you would like to have it displayed on your website, just imagine having to pay a web designer to create those statuic pages, while a web developer can do all this with just one page.
Why is that?
Because a web developer will advice you on the best solution available by creating a database that will hold all your products.
Then he creates a page that will interact with the database, displaying these products one by one based on the user request.
They can be sorted and grouped into categories, type, make and model, which will make it a lot easier to find what you are looking for with just few clicks.
When the website is designed based on a database, your content / product can be found using a search form.
Recently we re-designed 2 websites that were created by some “web designer“.
The customer came to us due to the fact that he cannot be found in any search engines.
Both websites were more than a year old and only one of them had few pages in Google Search Engine.
When we took a look at them, both were inaccessible in FireFox, due to bad javascript code used to create the navigation menu, and one of them had more than 1400 html errors.
There was more errors on the page than the content itself.
It took us few days to clean up the code but in the end both website were more user friendly, more pleasant without the need of heavy graphics, and few times more responsive.
We created XML site-map for each website and submit it to Google and in just a matter of few days both should start coming up in the SERPS.
In conclusion, do your homework when thinking of getting a website done.
Should you be looking for a web designer or a web developer?
