The terms web designer and web developer are used interchangeably in the media and advertising. But it is not the same. Design involves what the visitor sees on your website, development involves the site’s functionality. This article explores the difference between these two disciplines.
A website containing several different aspects:
* Look and feel – mostly graphics, color scheme, navigation elements, etc.
* Content – information, products, etc. on the website.
* Functionality – functionality includes interactive features that the website provides to visitors and the necessary infrastructure needed to provide them.
* Usability – the site from a visitor perspective and include things like program interactions, navigation and usability.
Look and Feel
Appearance and includes general appearance of the website. A graphic designer decides what colors and fonts to use and how to layout each of the sites pages.
The graphic designer must have a good understanding of aesthetics and sense of which combination of colors and images will project the image that the website owner wants visitors to have on site.
Contents
Content is the entire text, available on a website and include everything from politics to protect a very persuasive sales letter extolling the benefits of a product and ask the visitor to part with their hard earned money and everything in between. If it is written text, then it is a part of the contents. You need a copywriter and editor for creating good content.
Functionality
Functionality includes all the interactive aspects of a web site, and includes animation. The common denominator is that programmers are using different web programming languages that work either on a Web server or in a web browser to create all these functions.
Flash can be used to animate graphics. Perl, PHP and Java programming language is used on the Web server for creating sophisticated dynamic web pages. These pages can work independently, but often with a database to create all the features we have come to expect from a website.
JavaScript is used in the browser to create a lot of cool effects such as swapping images when a mouse moves over an image, “ticker tapes” links changing colors, etc. JavaScript working in the user’s Web browser rather than on the Web server.
There are also other “backend” applications that are transparent to the visitor, such as form processing, content management and other management applications that enables non-programmers to maintain certain aspects of the website data.
All these programs have to be integrated into the HTML code to be used on the website.
Usability
Usability is the website from the user perspective and includes mostly testing things like:
* Is appearance and is actually portray the correct image?
* Is the navigation is user friendly?
* Does navigation lead the visitor to where the owner wants them to go?
* Does the site load quickly?
* Do the applications work properly?
Design Versus Development
Unfortunately, there are a lot of overlap and integration needed between web design and web development. When you throw in content creation and usability testing, it becomes a real mess.
Can a single person to do all these things? There are some people who can do all these things, but most people only do one or two of the tasks.
Web design usually involves creation of content and appearance, while web development involves creating the functionality and testing its usability.
Web designers should be skilled with graphic design tools like Photoshop. Most also know HTML, so they can implement their designs. But using the animation on the site and layout for the site content is also part of the web designer responsibility.
Many site owners to deliver content to the website, but a web designer must be able to edit and even write the content if necessary. Web designers usually do the usability testing of navigation and homepage loading speed.
Web development programmers create functionality to the website, but all this functionality must be integrated into HTML pages on the site. Alternatively, the HTML content will also be integrated into the program. Web developers also do usability testing on site, at least for the functionality they provide. So programmer should also have some HTML knowledge so well.
In both cases, web designer and web development programmer must work together to ensure that the website does all that the owner of the site requested.
Bottom Line – Only big companies can afford to hire separate experts in graphic design, content production, programming and usability testing of building a new website. In most other cases the web designer and web development programmer two different people who must work together to create a successful website.