Web Design or Development: Is There a Difference?

When you need help building a website, finding someone in Charleston, SC isn’t that hard, if you know what you’re looking for. Many people use the words web design and website development interchangeably when describing what they’re looking for. The reality is, design and development complement each other and work together, but they are different things. 

What Is Web Design?

Web design is the customer’s interaction with your website. The design is the colors they see, the layouts and menus they navigate, the pages they read and the way your blog looks. It’s their experience on the surface, much like the experience you have in a grocery store. You see the stocked shelves, neatly organized in a way that makes sense (you don’t find the corn next to the toilet paper which is next to the milk). What you don’t see is the warehouse in the back, where the stock that isn’t ready for the shelves is kept. 

Design incorporates user expectations. It considers where users expect to find things on a website and ensures that the back button works as they’d expect, among many other things. 

This is mostly visual, though some web designers do have development skills as well. It’s about making sure that your customers see a beautifully designed website that they can smoothly and easily navigate without confusion or frustration. 

What Is Website Development?

Development is the grocery store’s warehouse. This is where the foundation of the site is. This is all the stuff that doesn’t always make sense to most people, yet it’s what provides the smooth, easy to use interface that your customer sees. This is where the web coding comes in. You’ve heard of code: HTML, CSS, JavaScript, or others. 

It provides deeper functionality, such as providing your customers with information from a database or creating a shopping cart that functions with a variety of payment processing options. 

Front-end development provides the interface or builds the visual design that the web designer shows to you. 

Back-end development provides the database information, shopping cart, or other deeper functionality that you need. 

It can apply to a single page with some HTML and CSS, or it could refer to an entire website with hundreds, or even thousands, of lines of codes. 

Which One Do You Need?

Whether you need a designer or a developer depends on what you need your site to do. It also depends on whether you currently have a site that you’re looking for someone to help you improve upon, or whether you’re just getting started and need something built from scratch. You may need just the designer or just the developer. You might need both. 

The good news is, we handle both. Whether you need a designer, developer, or both, we can work with you to create a stunning site. Your customers will love visiting your site and come back again and again. Contact us to find out how we can help you with your site today!