Web Development Versus Web Design – Is There Really A Difference?

There are many people who simply do not know the difference between a web design company and a website development company. The words “website development” and “website design” are considered to be two sides of the same coin. For a website to be usable and functional in the virtual world of the World Wide Web, it requires both the services of a website development professional and a web design professional. Sometimes, a web development company and a web design company can be the same company but different professionals working within the same organization. On the other hand, it can be totally different companies as it’s a completely different set of expertise for design versus development.

What Does a Web Design Company Do?
Designing a website as it is known, tends to include a whole range of things, right from its planning to the execution. Moreover, designing a website in this web world generally refers to a process of providing ideas and incorporating them within the designing aspect effectively. This process is of creating a design or bringing an idea to virtual canvas can done by using different graphic software such as Adobe Photoshop. When a web design professional designs a webpage, he or she provides a framework for the look and feel of the webpage. It includes many things such as the website’s whole appearance such as colors used, images placed, the layout, functionality and much more.

It can be said that it is quite essential for a web design company to hire professionals who are very creative, imaginative and can come up with fresh ideas. They have to be able to understand your vision and what you are looking to bring to life as the designing aspect is at the core of what makes or breaks a website. Web design professionals working at a web design company need to have a clear basic understanding and knowledge of back-end development work, which goes into creating a website. Furthermore, knowledge in the technicalities that are involved in creating a site is essential as these professionals will know what is possible and not possible.

What Does a Website Development Company Do?
Website development is known as the process of how to actually convert or create this design which has been given by the design company or a designer into a fully functional site. Many times a design is provided by a web design company or a designer in a PSD format which is used to create a website. It can be said that a website development company has professionals who use various codes and programs for constructing the website’s back end, such as Dreamweaver, Notepad, etc.

Web development in general is referred to the website’s non-designing aspect to develop and create a web page, using different scripting language forms such as PHP, JavaScript, ASP.NET, ASP, Ruby on Rails etc. Experienced website development companies makes use of appropriate web development principles to ensure that the website will load smoothly, quickly and without any kind of glitches.

An good website development company has to bear in mind about a website’s usability factor, while developing a site. The term ‘usability’ here refers to how the site will be viewed and interacted with when being used by its potential visitors. These aspects and more are all things that need to be taken into consideration when developing a website.

Summary
Making a website project a success requires both the web design company’s designer and the website development company’s developer to work together ensuring that from a design perspective things are great but also that they can actually work when being developed. Therefore, understanding the difference between what a web design company and a website development company does it critical to ensure that you have a great website. Ideally, if you have a company that can do both, then that’s even better. If you need any help with either or are both aspect of website development or design, feel free to reach out to the team at Mind Digital Group.