The Difference Between Website Design and Website Development

This article explores the diffence between the two often mis-used terms: design and development.

Table of Contents for This Page
1. The Difference Between Design and Development

1.1 What is Website Design?
1.2 What is Website Development?

1. The Difference Between Design and Development

For most people, designing a website is synonymous with website development. Sometimes people will believe that the website quote they receive is way overpriced. This doesn't always mean that the website designer is trying to take advantage of the client. So let's clear the fog and shed some light on the facts, because there is a clear difference between website design and website development.

1.1 What is Website Design?

Website Design implies a graphic designer creating the visual presentation of a website using graphic art software such as Photoshop, Paintshop Pro or the free ones such as Gimp. Often a secondary developer takes the mock-up created by the designer and turns it into HTML code, which is the language that web browsers understand. This person is also responsible for creating CSS code, which is nothing more than a set of rules that define the visual style (size, color, font, and so on) of particular website elements. At the basic level, that's what goes into designing a website and this is what's considered to be Website Design.

As far as the costs concerned, design services are usually considered to be less expensive than development costs by the industry standards.

1.2 What is Website Development?

A Website Developer, on the other hand operates by different principles. Website developers, also known as Web Programmers, focus on writing code in different Web Programming languages such as HTML, Javascript, PHP and several others. In the beginning, Flash concent could be created only by using WYSIWYG (Acronym for: What You See Is What You Get) software. This means that to create interactive Flash animation, the website designer could directly modify the appearance of design elements and animate them by hand, simply by drawing new objects or rearranging objects on the screen using the mouse. Adobe, the company that created the Flash platform, has eventually realized that the interest in Flash could be increased in the programmer's community, as well. But programmers write code, they don't design graphics content. So a language called Actionscript was created to allow programmers to write code in order to achieve what Website Designers could previously achieve by using WYSIWYG software. Website Development is considered to be a more elaborate job than website design, because programmers are required to think about solving logical problems. Therefore, Website Development costs are usually much greater than Website Design costs.

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The Difference Between Website Design and Website Development