Thursday, August 29, 2013

Web Design vs. Web Development



Looking to create or update your small business website? You’re probably shopping around for different professionals who can get the job done for you and will no doubt hear the terms “web design” and “web development”. Both are equally important, but are they one in the same? Are they completely different? The answer is they are kind of like a married couple: you almost always see them together and associate the two as one entity, but they are two distinct areas. However, they work best when they are together.

Web design is the customer-facing part of the website. It is concerned with the look and feel—colors, layout, logos, and text—as well as usability, or how easy it is for customers to navigate and do things on the site. Often web designers have graphic design, photo editing, content writing, and search engine optimization skills. They also need to keep up with web accessibility guidelines, which change with trends, technology, and software updates. Web designers also consider things such as making clickable areas large enough to adapt to the precision of the user’s mouse, putting captions on videos for users hard of hearing, and using clear language and instructional graphics so people can easily understand content. Web development is the back-end of the websites—the “nitty-gritty” stuff such as programming, coding, scripts, and forms. Web developers need to know all the web “languages” such as HTML, CSS, and PHP. This part of the website creation process is all about how to keep a site running effectively and making sure visitors can do what they need to do on the website.

As said, the two go together in almost every case. Web designers need to know programming and techniques to ensure functionality and web developers need to know about graphic design, photo editing, creating layouts, and more. To someone outside of website creation professions, all they really need to know is that these two terms are both important and both necessary for a successful website.
 


Beyond Custom Websites has a team of experts who cover every aspect of both web design and development with every small business website we create. But we don’t stop there—the team at Beyond Custom Websites offers marketing expertise, technical support, and unlimited updates and changes to your website with us. Our goals is to get small businesses found online and deliver an original, highly functioning site that will increase sales and get you results. Find out more on our website.

1 comment:

  1. Both are equally important, but are they one in the same? Are they completely different? The answer is they are kind of like a married couple: you almost always see them together and associate the two as one entity, but they are two distinct areas. However, they work best when they are together. Keswick web design

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