Website Design or Website Development: The difference explained

If you would have looked for site development services on the Internet, you would have seen that the terms web designing and web development are often used interchangeably. However, these are not the same. Website designing is all about the look and feel of a website, while website development takes care of the website’s functionality.

If we try to divide a website based on its important aspects, we may come up with the following four parameters:

1. Look & Feel : This includes the graphics, color scheme, and other navigation elements
2. Functionality: This is one of the most important aspects. It consists of interactive features and the underlying technology
3. Usability: This decides the ease-of-use of a website. Navigation is one of the factors here.
4. Content: This is the text that is used to describe the website (products/services etc.)

Let us understand each of these factors one by one.

Look & Feel

It is important that the overall appearance of a website is interesting, and attractive. Based on colors and fonts, a graphics designer decides the layout of various web pages. This calls for a good aesthetic sense, and the patience to try various combinations of colors and images.

Functionality

This is achieved through use of web development languages such as Perl, Php and Java. These technologies enable creation of dynamic web pages that either work independently or are linked to a database (DB). Animation and other interactive aspects of a web site are subsets of functionality. Many business owners (especially beauty, entertainment and health) like Flash technology to animate the graphics. You must have seen effects like swapping of images when you hover the mouse over an image. This, and many other effects like color change can be brought into effect through use of JavaScript.

Content Management, Form processing and various other administrative functions constitute the backend of the website. Even non programmers can assess this part of the website to necessitate changes, if required.

Usability

This is mainly about assessing a website through the eyes of the user. Navigation, loading time, applications and other aesthetic aspects of the website are tested here. This aspect is important for dynamic web development or interactive website development.

Content

Without content, a website would be incomplete. Description of the company, services/products, and other menu items is important to convey the message to the reader. Compelling content is required for a website to ‘talk’ to the user. Website content development, therefore, is an important job.

Coming back to our topic of website design versus website development, one must understand that both these are independent as well as dependent on each other. Whether it is about business website development (or corporate web development), a website programmer and website designer often have to work together to bring forth the ‘best’.

A website designer has to have a good command over tools like Photoshop, and technologies like HTML. Editing of content is also the responsibility of the website designer. The designer also performs Usability testing for the navigation and loading time.

The best example of a website developer and website designer working hand-in-hand may be ecommerce website design. For such a website, the programming side requires knowledge of web development technologies such as PHP, JavaScript, Java, JQuery, Shopping carts, Payment Integration and other technologies. The design aspect is no less complex. Given the large number of categories of products, and the products, the designer has to design a user friendly template that is easy to navigate, and of course, good to look.

Hence, if you are looking for web programming, do not forget the aspect of website designing, and vice versa. A website development project plan of a web application development company should include both aspects.