Gone are the days when you webpages could be regarded as online pamphlets or brochures. Today, websites look and feel more like full magazine spreads, replete with branding, aesthetic continuity and carefully composed color schemes. Depending on the website, it may also function less like a flyer and more like a full-featured web application.
In short, Internet users are expecting more from their online experiences—and in order to stay competitive, businesses, services, blogs and social media sites need to embrace the full potential of the Web. This is where Web Designers and Web Developers step in.
Web design is a blanket discipline that encompasses the layout, aesthetic look and feel and, in most cases, the construction of the website. Web designers bring their creativity and their design principles to the table and bring them to life through coding, styling and other technical applications.
Web development is an even more encompassing term. Web development often includes web design, but it can also refer to the development of a website’s functionality. Web developers work behind the scenes to create client-side and server side scripting, administer web servers and ensure that networks are secure.
All in all, the construction and maintenance of a website involves both forward facing and behind the scenes work. The result is a cost-effective, immersive and sometimes interactive web browsing experience for customers, users and colleagues. Web design and development seeks to bring together all the critical aspects in order to make the Internet more usable and more enjoyable.