Difference between Web Design and Web Development

All the beautiful and powerful websites you see on the internet are the cumulative creation of web designers and web developers. People who are new to web development often interchangeably use the term web developers with web designers, but actually, these are two different professions. Small organizations which are not dedicated to web sites, do not hire Web designers, rather they ask their web developer to design and develop the complete website, but the big organizations which market mostly depend on their website, hire both web designer and web developers to create a beautiful, interactive and powerful website.

Here in this article, we have explained What is the difference between a Web Designer and a Web Developer & what roles they perform while creating a website.

Web Designer

In Industry before we create or develop something, first we create a blueprint and a proper plan for how things will go around when employees work on that project. A Web Designer is the first person who gives the idea and layout of the complete web site. They design the overall look & feel of the web page and create a plan of how and where every element of the website will go. We can imagine a web designer as an Architect who designs a blueprint or a layout of our website.

Web Designers are always underrated but they also play a vital role in web development, it’s the job of a web designer to design a user-friendly web page, and provide the best environment to the user so they are always hooked up with your web site.

The main job of a web designer is to create or imagine such an interface that could catch the attention of the users and the interface should be logical, which means it could be implemented by the web developers. Like a web Developer a web designer does not need to have expert knowledge of web sites working or building they just need to design a web site which could attract more users to their web site, however, they should have prior knowledge of how the web sites work and is it possible to create the web site which they are designing right now.

Roles of a Web Designer

  • A Web Designer uses tools like Adobe Photoshop, Framer, or Sketch to design the blueprint of the website.
  • A web designer must have good skills in graphic and logo design.
  • A web designer must know how to design a website with a rich user interface with less complexity.
  • They also need to design the proper slot where all the elements of the website will fit such as images, buttons, and other general formats.
  • A web designer needs to update the layout of the website according to the market trend and also try to introduce new features on the website.
  • A web designer should know which color and font format will be fit for the website.
  • A web designer should know about Search Engine Optimization, so they design such a website which could rank on the famous Search engines.
  • A web designer needs to design a balanced and logical layout.

Web Development

Web Developers are the programmers who give life to the Web Designer’s Layout, web-developers use the Markup and Programming languages to write the code for the website. There are two types of web developers, Front-End Developers, and Back-End Developers. For some reason the front-end developers are treated as web-designers because they create the interface of the web page you, everything you see on a webpage or anything that you can interact with is created by the Front-end developers.

Front-End Web Developers

Front-End web developers use the trinity tools HTML, CSS and JavaScript to build the interface of a web-site. It is a Job of a Front-End Developer to create the UI that has been designed by the Web Designer. All the buttons, font layout, topography, Images, headings, and title of the website is handled by the Front-End Developers.

Back-End Developers

These days all the websites are dynamic in nature which means they all use Database to store and extract data, and the Back-End developers write the code for this dynamic nature of websites. There are many tools and programming languages can be used to create the back-end of a website, such as Java, SQL, Python, PHP, C++, C#, etc. Unlike the Front-End tools, programming languages are not stable for back-end development, the organization may change their back-end tools with time.

Full-Stack Developer

A Full-Stack Developer works on different layers, but in a nutshell, we can say that a full stack developer is that person who has the knowledge of both the technologies Front as well as Back-End.  In Big-Organization they have separate teams for front end development and back-end development, but small organizations that do not afford to have multiple developers always search for the full-stack developers who can code for both the Ends.

Role of a Web Developer

  • Build the User Interface for the website using tools such as HTML, CSS, and JS languages.
  • It’s the job of a front-end developer to build such an interface that could load fast on any browser.
  • It’s a Job of a Front-End Developer to create such Interface which could hold dynamic content from the backend.
  • Back-End developers deal with the main logic and database of the website.
  • There should be clear communication between the back-end and front-end developers.
  • It’s a Job of the web-developers to design the exact model that has been presented by the web-designer.

Job & Salary Factor

It’s very hard to find a job as a Web Designer because many companies do not offer the Job for web-designer they just simply ask their front-end developer to design an interface. On the other hand, finding a job as a Web-Developer is very easy, but you need to update your skills with time because the technologies used to build websites update every day and it might be possible that the tools you know get obsolete in a year or so.

As there are not many jobs for web-designers this also affects the salary, web-designer always paid less as compared to the web-developer. However, the Salary depends on the Organization and the Designer and Developer Experience but the designer always paid less.

Average Salary

Designer:  $10-$50 p/h,
Developer: $30-$65 p/h.

Conclusion

Web Design and Development are two different professions however you do not see too many jobs for a web-designer, but there are plenty of Jobs for a web-developer. A web-designer only deals with the layout of the website, whereas the web developer brings the website into life by writing code using different technologies.