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Web Design and Development Overview
One of the primary services that people seek from a business like us is Web Design, but there are other services and skills that relate to the creation of today's websites. Let's start by Contrasting Web Design and Web Development. Now, in speaking to folks that I would consider representative of our target market, the feedback I got was that they did not know there was a difference between Web Design and Web Development, in fact they may not care about the terminology used.
It might, however, be valuable to discuss the differences in order to evaluate the skills of the company you are hiring to do your website.
Web Design and Web Development
Web Design relates to the appearance of the website, the look and feel of the site. This also includes the presentation of the content on the page, the choice of fonts, and other aspects related to the presentation of the content.
Today's websites rely on interactivity and/or access to and presentation of information stored in a database. So, the Web Designer may be said to be working on the site front end (whereas the web developer handles the back-end). The line separating these two areas has overlaps. A web designer will work with XHTML and Cascading Style Sheets, producing code in these languages.
The Web Developer does more of the programming, or coding, as it's called and more in depth work with the databases that support a website. It is a more technical approach to or aspect of creating websites. Future Wave Designs provides services that encompass both Web Design and Web Development.
As stated, most websites today do require some form of interactivity in the form of menus, widgets, and other user interface components. The Web Developer will develop software applications that either run in the browser, on the users computer and/or include software that runs on the server. In the past, the website just presented some information and you didn't interact with it in any way other than to go from one page to another; these are described as static websites. However, if you want a professional looking website that engages the user you'll want a Web Developer who can create interactive web applications An effective user interface makes it easier for your users or visitors to find your information, complete the tasks you want them to complete and stay engaged with your site.
You might hear the term Web 2.0 to describe these types of websites because some of these applications allow the user to contribute to the website. A website owner can maintain his or her website without having any special web design or development skills. The website owner updates the website by simply entering information into easy to use web forms.
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Web Development Tools and Techniques
In addition to interactivity, modern websites are database driven. This means that fresh content can be added to the database as often as necessary or desired. This gives visitors a reason to return to your site and it also allows you to keep the content on your website fresh and new. To make this possible, a web developer will write programs or applications (often extending or customizing existing software applications). At other times the web developer will work with software applications, writing code (programming) customizing the installation to meet the needs or desires of the client.
Interactive features are often made possible with software written to run in the browser on a user's computer. In most cases this is code or programming written in JavaScript or a JavaScript Library such as JQuery.
Web 2.0 applications, also known as dynamic database-driven applications also rely on software code, programming, that runs on the web server. These web applications include, but are not limited to, the following:
Blogs - such as Wordpress
Content Management Systems, such as Drupal or Joomla
Photo Galleries
E-commerce Applications, or shopping carts.
Wikis - such as Mediawiki which runs Wikipedia.org
