What's the Difference Between Web Design and Web Development
What's the Difference Between Web Design and Web Development?
By: RedTree Design, a Louisville Web Design company.
In our opinion, there are folks who "design" websites and there are folks who "develop" websites and of course, folks who do both. The terms are often used interchangably, yet they should be distinguished between each other.
Web Design
We look at web design as an aspect to the overall objective of website development. If you haven't noticed by now, there are hundreds of thousands of websites that "look" really flashy and attractive. They are very graphically intense and many of them are completely developed using Flash Animation. Generally speaking, there's nothing really wrong with this if you intend to receive all web traffic through links on other sites or advertising. Because these sites are notoriously graphic-intense and flash-driven, the search engines (of which the majority of internet users find websites) cannot search images or flash animation and therefore cannot adequately rank content. This inevitably means the website will not be found or found dozens of pages after a keyword search.
Now, if you know anything about RedTree Design, we strive to be creative and unique holding a high regard for attractive, clean and professional websites. It's what you should expect from a Louisville web design company. With regards to website design, there is nothing wrong having a creative design, even using flash animation, as long as the design or flash animation doesn't infringe on the content or text that is available. Take for instance the RedTree website. A clean, professional design with a little bit of flash and plenty of room for content. We "designed" the site for this purpose because we "developed" it as well. Read on for a better explanation.
Web Development
It is our firm conviction that website's need more than just a flash design. They need to be developed. The development process for RedTree Design is to design the site in a manner that best reflects our client's image but that also provides the best method of searchability and visibility. By this, we mean your site can easily be indexed by Google, Yahoo, Msn, etc. and as well is visible on all browsers and on all computers. Not every design firm does this, but it is crucial to the success of any website.
This "development process" also includes the site navigation, management of content and the tools we choose to use in developing the website. For instance, if you look at the code behind the RedTree site, you won't find any tables. Tables were never meant to be used as a method of design, yet for years practically everyone has used them to "hold together" the website. We now design all of our websites in CSS. CSS is the preferred method of "holding together" the website and stylizing the website, especially because it makes it easy for search engines to read the content. Not so, when your site is developed using tables, there are dozens, if not hundreds of added lines of code per page. The search engines hate this and often will neglect to read the entire page if the search bots find the code to be confusing or messy. The point here is that every website we design, we develop and spend a large amount of time thinking through the best process to keep your site design attractive and fresh, but effective and search engine friendly. This is also what separates us from the competition. The next time you are looking for a web design firm to upgrade your website or to design a new one, ask them if they are W3C compliant and if they code with CSS vs. tables. If they look puzzeled or try to give some excuse as to why they do what they do, move on and look for another design firm. Or just contact RedTree!
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About the Author
President of RedTree Design, A Louisville Web Design Company specializing in Web Site Design, Graphic Design and Photography.