Web Design & Web Development – What’s The Difference?

Two Roles in the website creation

Today, I wanna talk to you about the difference between web design and web development. These are two separate roles in the website creation process. Some people do both of them together, but not everyone does, as they do involve a very different skill set for each. And there are many jobs available for both design and development separately and together. If you want the short version, web design involves creating what the website should look like and how it should work. Web development involves building and bringing that design to life as a functioning website. But let’s go into more detail on each of those things.

UI User interface and User

Designing a website involves taking a brief and the information that a client or company wants to be displayed on a website and working out the best structure. Web designers think a lot about the user’s journey through the site and arrange the information in a way that means they see the right content at the right time. And they also think a lot about making that information really easy to consume. That 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 a site’s visual look and feel, and that’s called the user interface, or UI.

Website Design

What a website looks like is really important because you have to make sure that the design ties in with the company’s brand and that the information is easy to read and consume, and it’s just nice to look at. So, just like with graphic design, web designers think about typography, colour, positive/negative space, and other design principles.

There are many different pieces of software out there you could use to design a website, but none of them is going to do the hard work for you; they’re all just tools to get your ideas out and create a visual file, or mock-up, to hand to a developer. And we call it a mock-up because it visually looks like a website, but it doesn’t function as one yet. Once the design is completed, that’s generally when the development side starts. And like I said, this involves taking that mock-up and bringing it to life through code to function as a live website that you can put on the internet for people to use.

HTML, CSS, DRUPAL

The base of a website is created using HTML, which organizes the site’s structure in code. And then, CSS is used to style the HTML, that base structure, to match the colours and shapes of the design that the designer created. There are many different programming languages, and not every web developer will 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 ensuring that the site functions correctly, and matches the design but also that the code is written cleanly so that it can load quickly for the user. And usually, developers will use a text editor like Sublime or Brackets to write and edit their code.

Hopefully, from that explanation, you can see what I mean about these two different skill sets. Designers need more of an understanding of design principles and creativity to develop a unique layout that answers the client’s brief. And developers focus more on logic-based thinking and an understanding of how code and technology work. As I said at the start, some people have both of these skills, but it’s not essential to know the development side to be a web designer or the design side to be a web developer. What is essential, though, is having a basic understanding of both of those things.

I’m a web designer, and I have a good basic understanding of code, so much so that I can actually code my own websites. But I don’t focus on that as a career because I prefer the design side, and that’s what I’m best at. However, having a basic understanding of how the website I’m designing will be coded is really useful to my design process. And I always love it when I work with a developer who has a good understanding of design, too, because it means it’s much easier to work together.

So, if you were confused about the difference between these two roles or were trying to decide which would be best for you, I hope this blog helps you. Make sure you give it a thumbs-up if it did. And if you’re new around here, hello, welcome. At BWD, we do both website design and website development. Hope we can work together in the future