Websites play a pinnacle role in today’s world. A lot is dependent on a mere website which is like the digital face of your company. The website’s home or landing page is one of the most important elements that need to be designed. Often web design and web development are used interchangeably. However, both these terms are different therefore having a debate of web design vs web development is an unmistakable argument that a lot of people tend to fall for.
As soon as someone hears about your business, the first go-to place is the website which unveils the products and services of your company to them. But once the user is on the website, apart from the aesthetics – the implementation of business flow, the catalog experience, user interaction and purchase: all these components are as vital as the website’s overall look and feel. This debate will explain what website design and website development, do during the journey of a website project. First of all, it is important to understand what both of these terms really mean.
What is Web Design?
In true essence, web design is the start of a website as it allows designing different aspects of the website including its layout, content and graphics.
Web Designers – Creative Geniuses behind Website Layout
When we talk about web designing, the heroes behind the look and feel of websites are the web designers. These are the masterminds or geniuses who come up with how a website should be including the layout, color scheme, fonts, images, placement of content and even the flow of the business scenarios.
How is Web Designing done?
The web designers usually start off with a discussion with the customer and understand the requirements and purpose of the website. The customer can also share their logo, branding or existing web collateral about the kind of image they already have in the market.
In agile methodology, specialized web design services can be rendered in the form of design sprints. These are usually conducted by a single or a team of web designers. They work closely in jotting down the requirements and the business flows. For this reason, specific software can be used in narrating the flows.
From there onward, web designing phase is carried forward in creating wire-frames or mock-up screen designs. The customer’s input is crucial in verifying these wireframes as these mock screens are interconnected to help elaborate various business scenarios through the website.
It is also important to mention that the customer sign-off is necessary in this stage as without their approval, web development can be carried forward. For example, imagine a customer disagreeing with a business flow and still the development took place on the wrongly created flow. This will hugely impact the project in delivering the wrong requirements. It will also lead to wasting extensive time and resources in developing something that will be ultimately rejected by the customer.
So, you can envision a web designer like a torch-bearer for a website development project. They help you illustrate the business scenarios, screens and the flows for end-users.
What is Web Development?
A broader term used for creating a website, web development can mean coding a simple static page or programming complex web-based applications. It includes various aspects like web design, web engineering, web content creation, client liaison, client-side/server-side scripting, web server and network security configuration, e-commerce development, and web app development, etc.
Basically, web design is a subset of web development which encompasses various other aspects. In entirety, the whole concept of developing a website starting right from envisioning an idea to the end delivery of the source file that is deployed on server – all the journey is part of the web development.
How Web Development works?
Web development kicks off when the project kicks off – we mean literally. So, you have just started off on planning a project and divided it into various phases. You will probably analyze the requirements and then break those requirements down into business use cases. In some refined companies, a Business Analyst takes up the responsibility of writing clear user stories and then collaborating with a Web Designer to envision the business requirements in form of screens and flows.
Once, this phase is complete, the Development or coding phase of the requirements begins. This is a very important aspect as the front-end and back-end elements of the website are being constructed in form of code or program. You can hire full-stack or single-tiered web developers who have expert in only the front or back-end programming.
After the code is complete, it needs to be validated. For this reason, Quality Assurance phase takes place that verifies that the developed screens and code is as per the stated business. If any bugs, or defects are identified; the respective area is sent back to the Development team for fixing the issue. Upon fixing, the QA team re-verifies to make sure that there are no further defects. On approval, the screens and code is signed off for demo to the customer.
As part of the website development services, the deployment of website into the server is also an additional facility that is part of the package provided by most companies. The post-deployment operations and maintenance can also be considered part of website development. They allow close monitoring of the website and ensure that any issue raised by users is solved with little fuss.
At times, a user may lodge a concern which sparks a new business requirement or an update in the existing one. This point once again leads to new requirements for a component of website development which starts the entire process from the very beginning.
Conclusion
A comparison like web design vs web development is not a showdown of the two disciplines. Website development encompasses website design under its umbrella. Therefore, web design comes under it and its rather ignorant to differentiate the two. Both have their own place and standing in the website solution project.
Web design helps in laying out the structure, theme, look and feel, and screen design for the website. While the web development is the overall end-to-end website project with various phases that are run in entirety to complete the project.
However, a lot of nontechnical people consider development as the only the coding aspect of the website. Even if that narrative is considered correct, the coding of a website is intertwined with various other stages of the project life cycle.
What’s important to remember is that website development is a huge arena with a lot of complexity that requires breakdown of all the elements with proper planning and execution. That’s what Techliance does at its best – we are a frontier website development services company with top-notch expertise in providing breath-taking website solutions. For a free quotation, contact us today.
