Website Design vs Website Development

In the following text I’m going to try and explain what the differences are between website design and website development.

Website Design

Graphics, colour scheme, navigation elements and so on and so forth are the components that when combined create a website's user interface. This part of the website is created by the web designer.


A website designer commonly designs the look and feel of the website as well as transforming the specification into relevant html code. If you’re not sure what html code is then right click on this web page and select the View Source option from the context menu.


If you’re not IT literate you’ll probably be staring at what looks to be a page of gobbledegook. HTML is a markup language used to define the layout and structure of a website. Styles may also applied to these elements using a technology called cascading style sheets or CSS. A detailed explanation of CSS is not within the scope of this article.

CODE 
<html>
    <body>
        <p>This is a paragraph.</p>
        <p>This is a paragraph.</p>
        <p>This is a paragraph.</p>
    </body>
</html>



Website Development

Developers or programmers are the people who create or develop the functionality within web pages. Some websites contain no dynamic or functional pages at all. These are commonly known as static html pages.


Other websites such as e-commerce, content management systems, blogs etc contain a lot of functionality. These functional parts of the website such as the ability to log in and out of the website, amend your profile, seen on websites such as facebook or myspace, are created by the web developer.


The code used to create this dynamic behaviour is not visible to the user like html is. Instead the code/application is executed on the server when a page is requested and subsequently responds to the client (you) with a rendered version of the page, in html.


Below is a snippet of some C# code written by a web developer.


CODE 
using System;
using System.Collections;
using System.Configuration;
using System.Data;
using System.Linq;
using System.Web;
using System.Web.Security;
using System.Web.UI;
using System.Web.UI.WebControls;
using System.Web.UI.WebControls.WebParts;
using System.Web.UI.HtmlControls;
using System.Xml.Linq;
using System.Text;
using System.IO;
using System.Xml;
using System.Xml.Xsl;
using System.Xml.XPath;

namespace BluWeb
{
    public partial class newsarticle : System.Web.UI.Page
    {
        protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
        {
            try
            {

                for (int i = 0; i < 11; i++)
                {
                    Response.Write(string.Format("Number {0}<br />", i));
                }
            }
            catch (Exception ex)
            {
                // handle exception.
            }
        }
    }
}


Although these are two completely different skills there is overlap. What I mean is that a web designer may have basic programming skills in a language such as javascript as well as a developer must know html to be able to work with web pages. Then again there are people that have the ability to do both.

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