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vivek kumar
vivek kumar

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What Is The Difference Between Web Design & Web Development

In this article, we are going to discuss the difference between Web Designing and Web Development.

Web Design and Web Development, these are 2 separate roles in the website creation process. web design involves creating what the website should look like and how it should work, and web development involves developing a website bring it to life as a functioning website.

Web Design
Designing a website involves taking brief information that a client wants to be displayed on a website, Creating mockups and working out the best structure for it.

Web designers think a lot about the website to make it creative, and arrange the information in an innovative way, that means they see the right content at the right place.

part of the design process is called user experience or UX as you may have seen it referred to as, but designers are obviously also responsible for the visual look and feel of the website, and that’s called the user interface, or UI.

What a website looks like is really important because you have to make sure that the design layout in with the company’s brand, and also that the information is easy to read and consume,

There are many different pieces of software (Adobe Photoshop, Sketch, Pixlr, etc) out there which could be used by a website designer to design a website.

Web Development
As mentioned earlier, Web development involves taking the mock-up and bringing it to life through code so that it functions as a live website that you can put on the internet for people to use.

The base of a website is created using HTML, which organizes the structure of the site in code and then CSS is used to style the HTML, that base structure, to make it match the colors and shapes of the design that the designer created.

There are many different programming languages and not every web developer is going to know them all. They’ll generally have their own few that they specialize in, but HTML and CSS are the basics that you start with. Developers are responsible not only for making sure that the site functions properly and matches the design, but also that the code is written cleanly, so it can load really quickly for the user. And usually, developers will use a text editor to write and edit their code.

The bottom line is, Designers need more of an understanding of design principles and creativity to come up with the layout that is unique and answers the client’s brief and Developers focus more on logic-based thinking and an understanding of how code and technology works.

Top comments (7)

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highcenburg profile image
Vicente G. Reyes

IMHO, web designers can be graphic artists/designers. Many companies think that web designers are also developers - but not. Had I not been brought up well, I would have smacked those companies in the face of what web designers and web developers' responsibilities are. But I won't go too far on that.

On a different note, I would raise yellow flag if I see a company requiring a web designer who codes - that only means they're trying to save money by hiring a developer inside a designer and vice-versa.

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flrnd profile image
Florian Rand

Sadly that's very common. Think as a full stack developer. Small and medium companies won't afford specialized profiles to be competitive. They will look for multidisciplinary people who can wear as many hats as possible.

But that's not something new, just check a job board of smaller cities around the world.

Small city = smaller accounts = low budget projects = multi-hat madness.

I'm not defending it, but I understand the reason behind some of those companies.

If you like, I can show you the job board where I live. Jobs are literally scarce, and the few ones... Oh my! the fun reading the requirements!

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highcenburg profile image
Vicente G. Reyes

Drop the link!

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flrnd profile image
Florian Rand

Do you speak Spanish? If so, look for jobs at domestika in Granada. If you don't, I'll translate the good ones!

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highcenburg profile image
Vicente G. Reyes

I wish I was taught to speak in spanish by my grandmother. Translate one please!