Difference Between Web Design and Web Development

Web designers are responsible for bringing a client’s vision and concept to life. They translate an idea into a design. A website design is not the website itself, but a representation of how a website is going to look and feel, for the user of the website.

Taking the analogy of building a house, you may think of a web designer as the architect, who comes up with the plan of the house. The plan is not a house, but it represents what the building contractors will use to build the house.

Web designers are concerned with formulating the visual and structural aspects of the website, such as layout. They determine where elements are going to appear on a website, including images or buttons. They are interested in the usability of the site that would be built. 

Placing a button at the top of a page may have significant impact on usability, that would be different, if the same button were placed at the bottom or on the right. Web designers would usually conduct usability tests, to evaluate the impact on usability of their design.

Web designers also experiment with various colour schemes and palettes, to find the best colours for a design, in conjunction with the client’s brand colours. Colour plays a big role in the likability and usability of a website.

There is an entire science behind using colours in design, such that the web designer has to have a firm grip of these concepts, in order to come up with the best design.

It is also critical that everything in a design gels together, and is applied with consistency across the website. Every single element in the design has to complement the whole, such that nothing looks out of place.

Web designers will often start with sketches, and then produce wire frames, which are handed over to web developers to implement the design. Wire frames are typically low fidelity representations of the design, showing only the main aspects of the design, although in some cases, highly detailed wire frames can be produced.