The term web designer is a safe catch-all phrase that doesn’t confuse people and is essentially a generalisation. If specific job titles are used, it would likely confuse someone outside of the web industry. Many people confuse the terms web design and web development and use them interchangeably. In reality, they have two very distinct meanings. If perhaps searching for a new job in the web design industry, or looking to engage a web professional in order to help you build an impressive website, you will need to understand the difference between the two terms fully.
For a start, the skill sets are different. Web designers possess a broad set of skills, primarily to do with visual design. The design is concerning what the front end users or customers see when they visit the site; the ‘visual’ experience. The best web designers know exactly how to use the best design principles to create a website that looks fantastic and works smoothly. They fully understand web usability and how to create websites that are easy to use, intuitive, and user-friendly. Their exceptional design encourages users to navigate around the site as long as possible. Web Designers do a lot more than just make a site look Good. They are the architects that control and dictate the usability of a site’s interface.
Website development, on the other hand, comes in two distinct flavours. Front-end and back-end development. A few of the skills overlap, but they have distinct and separate purposes. Front-end developers take the visual design side of a website and build it up again in code. It could be a website handed to them by an external visual designer, or created by themselves. Front-end developers use HTML for the construction and structure of the website. They use CSS to craft the visual style and the layout, and they also use Javascript.
For some small websites, front-end development might be the only type of development that the site needs for that particular project. Back-end development comes into play with more complex projects. They generally deal with more advanced and complex programming along with interactions on the website’s pages. Back-end web developers focus on how the website functions and how the users get to achieve their objectives by using specific functionality. They may include working with coding that interfaces with the database, or by creating additional features such as E-commerce shopping carts which are connected to the business’s online payment systems and processors.
The better web developers should know how to program CGI as well as scripts such as PHP. They will additionally have to understand about how web forms function, and how the different software packages and APIs (application programming interfaces) may be used to improve and connect the different types of software all together to craft creative solutions that meet the specific needs of users during their online visit.
In most situations, design and front-end development services for the smaller and more straightforward websites should be on an hourly basis, rather than engaging an advanced back-end coder full-time. For larger websites and projects, businesses sometimes hire whole teams of web professionals covering all of the different disciplines. Nevertheless, both web developers and web designers are vital to any business that has a website, large or small. Understanding the difference between them is just as important.