Web design and web development are terms often used interchangeably. If you have, you’re not entirely wrong. Design and development have skills that intersect. However, nuanced differences make one profession unique from the other.
What’s The Difference Between… Building A Brick-and-Mortar Store And A Website?
What’s the first profession that comes to mind when you want to build a brick-and-mortar or physical location of a retail store?
The architect, right?
The architect will ask you to describe your vision for your store.
- What do you want your store to look like?
- What colors do you have in mind?
- How many people do you want to accommodate inside the store?
- What’s your preferred floor area?
- What’s the seating arrangement?
- What kind of feel do you want your store to convey?
- Where do you plan to set up your products?
- What is your store’s checkout process?
The architect will present design drafts created with AutoCAD a few weeks after your meeting. Once a design has been approved, the architect will prepare the architectural blueprints.
The blueprints provide details about the construction of your home including:
- Building materials
- Dimensions of each room and area of the house
- Installation methods
- Site plan and elevation
- Timetable of construction
- Likewise, the architect will discuss the professionals involved in the construction of your store.
These professionals include:
- Civil Engineer
- Electrical Engineer
- Master Plumber
- General Contractor
- Interior Designer
The architect will oversee the construction of your store. He’ll regularly meet with these professionals to get progress updates. The architect will keep track of the construction budget and advise you of adjustments if needed.
Building a website is like building a brick-and-mortar store.
The website designer is the architect.
Web development is a team comprised of developers/programmers with the skills to optimize your website’s performance.
What Are The Roles And Responsibilities Of Web Design?
Web design focuses on two key areas of your website: Aesthetics and Usability.
Aesthetics refers to how your website looks.
When designing a brick-and-mortar store, the architect asks, “How do you want to greet your customers?”
The website designer will ask, “How do you want to greet your visitors?”
- What do you want them to see?
- What do you want them to read?
- What do you want them to learn about your business, products, and services?
- How do you want them to engage with your website?
- How do you want them to contact you?
- What colors best represent your business?
- Do you want to play videos on your website?
Aesthetics is important because you want the website to appeal to your users. People react favorably to beautiful images. Aesthetics also covers text content. Text must be visually compelling, but also appropriate and readable.
Using Comic Sans for a dental clinic website won’t work!
Usability refers to how the visitor uses or manipulates the features of your website.
Usability is User Experience (UX), an important criterion in Google’s search algorithm. It is the web designer’s goal to make your website easy to use for your visitors.
The web designer aims to design a website with the following qualities:
- Mobile-responsive
- Fast downloading web pages
- Easy to navigate
- Fully functioning buttons and links
- Updated external links
- Accessible to multiple browsers
- Secure from cyber threats
- Without these qualities, your website will be difficult to use.
For example, if the web page loads longer than five seconds, the user will abandon the search and go to a competing website.
A web designer could be a team comprised of professionals with the following skills:
- User Experience (UX) Designer: Responsible for incorporating software and features that provide users with memorable experiences.
- User Interface (UI) Designer: Responsible for incorporating graphics, images, videos, and other types of visual content, including typography to highlight the presentation of a product or a feature.
The UI Designer ensures features such as CTA buttons, drop-down menus, data fields, and social media icons are organized on the page and easily found by the user. - Visual Designer: The role of the Visual Designer is to put in the finishing touches ensuring the website looks and feels amazing.
To be clear, many web designers have all of these skills. However, for complicated websites, the web designer might bring in others with better experience and knowledge in these areas.
Website design’s responsibility is to build a website that amazes users with its aesthetic appeal and impresses them with its usability.
However, as the saying goes, “Image without substance is nothing.”
The web designer can’t do everything and needs help to ensure the website functions properly.
Enter Web Development.
What Are The Roles And Responsibilities Of Web Development?
Eye-popping visuals are great… but if your website can’t deliver the goods, users will click out.
The web developer transforms the visual creation of the web designer into a fully functioning website. The web developer isn’t a person but a team consisting of front and back-end developers.
The front-end developer uses programming languages such as JavaScript, HTML, and CSS to enable visitors to interact and use the website’s features.
The back-end developer is called such because this web developer handles the server side of the website. The website’s assets are stored and organized on the server. It’s the job of the back-end developer to ensure the assets display and function properly on the front end.
The back-end developer does this by writing scripts called Application Programming Interface (API) that enable the software applications incorporated by the front-end developer to communicate with each other.
💡Note: There are also exceptionally skilled programmers called full-stack developers. These are professionals who can handle both the front and back-end side of web development.
What Are The Differences Between A Web Designer And A Web Developer?
The table below summarizes the differences between a web designer and a web developer.
| No. |
Item: |
Web Designer: |
Web Developer: |
| 1 |
Qualification: |
Creative |
Technical |
| 2 |
Objective: |
How a website looks and feels |
How a website performs |
| 3 |
Responsibilities: |
Visual Appeal and Usability |
Functionality |
| 4 |
Initial Task: |
Create mockups that capture the vision of the client |
Study if the concept is financially viable |
| 5 |
Skills: |
User Experience (UX) |
User Experience (UX) |
| 6 |
Software Used: |
Adobe Photoshop |
HTML |
Their roles might be different, but the objective is the same:
To create a visually attractive, usable, high-performance website that delivers excellent User Experience by providing users with the information and features they need to solve their problems or address their concerns.
Conclusion
You can’t have web design without web development. These professionals go together like peanut butter and jelly.
For this reason, it’s a good idea to entrust your website to a professional web design agency. You’re dealing with people who have worked together as a team.
In professional sports, you can assemble a dream team of superstars, but they won’t win unless they learn how to play together.
Also, with an agency, you’re assured of uninterrupted work. If a web designer gets sick, another one can assume the project. You have a better chance of meeting your deadline and staying within budget.
If you’re thinking of investing in a website for your business or redesigning your current one, contact us.
In addition to web design and web development, we offer digital marketing and SEO services.
Let’s get the ball rolling!
