WordPress Development

Ashley Gainer wrote an excellent article about the difference between Website Design and Website Development.

In the article she defines that Web development “refers to writing the actual code and scripts that take a web design and bring it to digital life” “Developers focus on how a site works”

Her article attempts to disambiguate the terms Website Design and Website Development in order to help people understand that when they are hiring one, they are not necessarily hiring the other.

In the article “Web design vs. web development: What’s the difference and why does it matter?” Ashley Gainer does a good job of describing how the two terms “Website Development” and “Website Design” are different.  She does this by defining each term

[Note that we use “Website Design” and “web design” as well as “Website Development” and “Web Development” interchangeably,  the ‘site‘ on the end of Website does not change the meaning of these terms]

WEB DESIGN

“Web design is the art of designing the “public” part of a website” it is “primarily a focus on what a site should look like and contain”

WEB DEVELOPMENT

“Web development refers to writing the actual code and scripts that take a web design and bring it to digital life” “Developers focus on how a site works”


The article continues on to describe why this distinction matters

…”there’s a very real difference between web development and web design, and the more we (as creatives) can clarify the difference, the better we’ll serve our markets and the stronger our businesses will be.”

Ashley’s claim that the distinction is important does make sense,   the individuals that are good at design are often not adept developers,    and adept developers are frequently better at ‘back end’ than ‘front end’.

WHAT IT MEANS TO WEBSITE OWNERS

For business owners looking for a company to implement a Website this would important so that the company recognizes that they must have both a designer and a developer to implement the site.

In reality though,  most Web professionals in the industry offer both services,   themselves or through a partner,  so they are able to provide a company with both services.