Blog 1 - Difference Between Web Design & Web Development

Difference Between Web Design & Web Development

With so many businesses joining the online sphere, it is imperative to have a highly functional and visually appealing website to present to your customers. When going through the process of setting up a world-class website, you will most likely work with both a website designer and a website developer. But why do you need to work with both? And what is the difference between the two? Here at Volcanic Creative, we have put together a comparison of the two that highlights the importance of using both to create the perfect website for your business.

What Is Web Design?

Website design involves several different elements. Mainly revolved around the front end of the site, they ensure the website looks good and performs well from both user experience (UX) and user interface (UI) perspectives. Their main focus includes images and image quality, copy, and the overall design and structure of the site. Some common skills that distinguish the web designer from the web developer are their focus on graphic design, UI design, UX design and logo design.

What Is Web Development?

On the other hand, Website development encompasses everything that goes into making a website work and is essentially bringing the web designer’s vision to reality. There are three main types of web developers: back-end developers, front-end developers, and full-stack developers. Back-end developers focus on the back-end of the site, which is where the website’s core structure is designed. This type of developer builds the parts of the website that users do not see and specialises in programming and software languages used to build websites, and spend a lot of time testing and fixing bugs. Front-end web developers focus on front-end or client-side development. This type of development uses HTML, CSS, and Javascript to build out parts of the website that users interact with. The last type of developers is known as a full-stack developer, and they work across both the front and back end of the site.

Web Designers Vs. Web Developers—Major Differences

Even though they are both crucial to the process of making beautiful and highly functional websites, there are three main differences between web developers and web designers.

Focus

As mentioned above, the main difference between web development and web design - the focus. While web designers focus only on the front-end design and appearance to users, web developers are responsible for designing and implementing the code required to bring the web designer’s vision to life.

Coding

Web developers are more focused on the technical aspects and therefore require a lot of technical knowledge. While coding is very important for web developers to understand and use to build a website, it is not a skill that web designers are necessarily required to have. However, though they don’t need to actually perform any coding, it is helpful for a web designer to understand how to code so that they can understand the limitations and costs to their designs.

Tools

Web developers and web designers use vastly different tools to perform their work on a website. Web designers will primarily use graphic design tools to create the design of your site. Such tools include: Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, and Inkscape just to name a few. Designers determine the user’s progression and the flow of information through the site and therefore will also focus on the analytics of the website. Web developers, on the other hand, use programming languages to bring a designer’s vision to life. They also use these languages to build out add-ons to the site like: user contact forms, user authentication, databases and more. They use tools like text editors, command line interface, and version control systems to build out the code.

Web Designer or Web Developer

If you are looking to build a highly competitive website, the answer is: both! Web developers and designers work together to bring a beautiful website to life. Your web designer will work with you to create a design that is in line with your brand and appeals to your customer, and your web developer will bring it to life and make sure it functions well! At Volcanic Creative, we design high-end websites for our clients and work with developers to manage the project and ensure it runs smoothly so you get your website up, running, and selling as fast as possible. For more information about our services, reach out to us on hello@volcaniccreative.com, give us a ring on 93871833, or pop in for a visit at T.O.M.S PLACE (1 Tripovich St, Brunswick, Victoria 3056).