Web Design And Web Development

Web Design And Web Development

Web design

Think about web designers as those who transform an idea, or a story, into a visually appealing design, and use their layout to build the user experience throughout the whole website. They design the website’s look and feel. As an architect would create a plan of your house prior to start building it, similarly a web designer would model the layout of your website before a web developer can start developing it.

 From sketching, web designers move to wireframes, mock-ups, and to the final design. Professional web designers build the whole website in design components, with a pixel perfect layout of all the web pages, icons, typography and other intricate features.

These are some of the main roles of a web designer:

• Using software tools such as Adobe Photoshop, Framer, or Sketch to build the final layout design of the website
• Have good skills in graphic design and logo design
• Have a good feel for user experience, to identify the simplest approach possible to attain the desired function. This includes the layout, buttons, images and the general format of the website.
• Web designers need to keep themselves up to date with the latest design trends. It’s also important to keep design consistency that is made popular from other web giant companies, such as Google, and Facebook. This makes the website environment and interface easier to navigate and use, as it is already familiar to the users eyes.
• Web designers have to also keep in mind the branding of the website, colour palettes to be used, and the typography and readability of the website.

Web development

Think about web developers as those who turn the designs into a live website. Web developers uses web languages and software tools to develop the design and functionality of a website. Notice, that web developers are further split into two sub-categories; front-end developers, and back-end developers. I see front-end developers as the connection between both web designers and back-end developers, as having a little knowledge of both, would allow a front-end developer to build a fully working website. A front-end developer is the one who builds the interface, and provides the layout as the interaction between the back-end of the website and the user.

Here are some of the main roles of a web developer:

• Building the actual interface through which a user interacts with the website. This interface is built by front-end developers using HTML, CSS, and JS languages.
• Front-end developers can use styling preprocessors, javascript libraries, and frameworks to fasten the process of development .
• Front-end developers provide the markup design to back-end developers, so they can implement a dynamic website, and submit all the required data on the server and databases.
• Back-end developers create the backbone of the website using languages such as PHP and MySQL.
• Both front-end and back-end developers can use the same development environments or IDEs (Integrated Development Environment). These are software application tools where you code and build the structure of the website.
• Web developers may also use versioning tools to keep a history of the previous builds. This will help them to quickly and effortlessly move back to a previous “unbroken” version if required to do so.

Closing thoughts

I hope you now have a clearer understanding of the difference between the roles of web developers and web designers. Keep in mind that both have essential roles, and the web would not exist without one or the other.