We live in an era where everything is done online. We can communicate with our friends and family and do our shopping online. Therefore, every modern company requires a powerful online presence and a website. This is why small business owners need to understand the purpose and meaning of website-development and website design.
People often think that these are the same thing. However, website design and development are two completely different things. Both are focused on offering a powerful online presence for small businesses. If you currently have a small business in the USA and want to move ahead of the competition, you must understand the best practices for website design and development.
What Is Website Designing?
Website designing is the art of transforming an idea into a visually aesthetic design. If you want to develop a website for your small business, you must have some visual idea regarding the look and feel of your website. In addition to this, you must have some ideas about the customer journey on your website. Maybe you want the customers to start on your landing page and end on your contact page.
Website designers have the power to transform your ideas and specific customer journeys into appealing website designs. They understand how to control customer journeys. Moreover, they can design beautiful pages and elements that will entice potential customers and targets towards your business.
Similarly, website designers deal with the overall look and feel of your website. Website designers primarily act as architects for your online presence. They sit down with the clients and understand the desired layout for the website. Their core purpose is to design a powerful and appealing website design that can be later used for developing the website.
What Are the Main Roles of A Website Designer?
Website designers have multiple roles when it comes to helping clients with a powerful online presence. Here are some of the topmost roles associated with web designers:
- Web designers use powerful illustration and graphic tools, such as Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, and Sketch to draw a visual design of your website.
- Web designers also possess powerful graphic designing and logo designing skills. It allows them to create a realistic design for your website that can be further modified to suit your requirements.
- They must also possess skills to deal with user experience and customer journeys. This is why they must understand how to create desired functions without any obstacles in their path. This means that they understand how to create different buttons, images, and other website elements. It helps users can quickly identify what they want to do on the website.
- Web designers must stay in touch with the latest designs and best practices. For instance, people go for minimalist designs and simple color palettes nowadays. Therefore, it doesn’t make sense to create a website filled with hundreds of different useless elements and features.
- Lastly, website designers must understand how to implement company branding into the website design. That they should understand how to highlight the brand logo and theme with the right color and typography.
What Are the Latest Practices for Website Designing?
All walks of life evolve with the latest advancements in the field of technology. This means that web designing has also improved and evolved over the years. Here are the latest practices and trends for website designers:
- Website designers must create a design that goes along with the business’s overall theme and mission. This means that the layout and color palette should be in sync with the ideology and branding of the small business.
- Moreover, it is also up to web designers to create a simple navigation system for customers. Complicated web designs may have worked in the 90s, but customers want simple and minimalist designs nowadays. Therefore, web designers should think about creating simple and straightforward navigation systems for a website.
- Web Designer should also think about offering responsive designs and interesting customer journeys.
- Nowadays, web designers make sure that their designs offer maximum legibility and readability for customers. This means that the chosen fonts should be powerful and visible enough to offer maximum readability to potential audiences.
- Lastly, it is also extremely important to offer social media buttons with a web design nowadays. The customer should have the option to share their favorite elements from your website with their fans and friends on social media.
What Is Website Development?
Once you have created a powerful web design for your company, it is time to transform that design into an actual website. This is where website developers jump into the scene. Their job is to take an existing website design from designers and turn it into a live website. Web developers implement the design and the functionalities of your website.
Website developers are categorized into two different groups: frontend developers and backend developers. The frontend developers primarily deal with the visual aspect of your website. This means that they work on the actual design of your website and turn it into a live working platform. On the other hand, backend developers primarily work with buttons and functionalities behind those buttons. This means that they write the code that deals with different user actions on your website.
Frontend developers work with three main languages. These languages are:
- Hypertext Markup Language (HTML)
- Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)
- Javascript (JS)
These languages are used to develop the front end and transform a design into an actual clickable website. They create different layout designs and use appropriate images to fill different sections of your website. It is also their job to add different animations and choose the right typography for your website.
On the other hand, backend developers to work with multiple languages depending upon their preferences. Here are the most commonly used languages for backend development:
- Php
- Python
- C++
- Ruby on rails
It is their job to handle server-side applications and requests. Therefore, backend developers primarily work with data requests and queries from users. They decide what kind of requests are to be handled by the website and what kind of data will be returned to the Graphical User Interface (GUI).
What Are the Roles of Website Developers?
Website developers have multiple roles when transforming a design into a live website. Here are the topmost roles associated with website developers.
- It is their job to build the actual interface for a website. Customers also use this graphical user interface to interact with the website and the business.
- Website developers also stay in touch with the latest trends and functionalities in the market. So, it is their job to make sure that all the different elements offer fast response times on the website.
- It is also their job to coordinate between different teams and share the frontend design with backend developers to offer seamless integration between the user interface and backend functionalities.
- Website developers also understand how to store the data into a database and allow quick access for customers and admin. This means that they store email addresses, contact numbers, and other information into a database that can be later used to start a funnel for the business.
- Website developers also keep track of previous versions of the website and maintain a track record for different builds.
What Are the Latest Practices for Website Development?
Developing a website is among the most important elements for setting up a powerful online presence for a small business in the USA. This is why website developers stay in touch with the latest trends and requirements for the development process. Here are the latest trends and practices for development:
- Website developers must understand how to offer fast response times for different buttons and page load times. This is why they implement the latest practices and techniques to ensure a fast response time for different elements. It means using the latest JavaScript libraries and minimizing third party elements from the website.
- Similarly, web developers also understand the importance of offering highly secure websites. This is why all modern websites utilize SSL 2.0 or above for authentication and verification processes.
- Web developers also ensure that the data is not lost while storing it in the database. This is why all the data is transformed into a JSON packet before sharing it with the respective database for the website. It is also their job to help small businesses set up a powerful funnel mechanism on the website.
Final Word
No small business can survive without a powerful online presence in today’s hostile climate. This is why you need to familiarize yourself with the differences between website designing and development. Once you understand the core differences between these processes, you will be better equipped to take charge of developing your website and staying ahead of the competition.
Website designers primarily deal with coming up with a beautiful design for your website. On the other hand, website developers transform that design into an actual website for you. We have also listed the latest practices for designing and development. This will help you understand what your website needs to take your business to the next level.