Today it’s not that simple to distinguish a difference between web design and web development. Misunderstanding of these two terms can cause problems for a web design company and its clients. Now web design has become a term that encompasses design and development.

It’s important for a company to explain their clients that the process of building a successful website requires both, web design and web development skills. And the client should also put an effort to understand this difference.

Web design

Web design determines the look of the site. The generic term covers the layout, navigation system and colors of the site. Web design also includes graphic material and logo design. It is the design that determines the aesthetics, functions, user experience and general impression of the site. A web designer is expected to make a website easy to use, navigate and fit its main purpose.

Web development

Web development carries functions of both, web design and development trends. However, web development is mostly all about back end programming. The functions provided by a web developer include registration, database applications, cms, etc. Visitors can carry out various actions on the site thanks to web development.

Web design skills

A professional web designer will have graphic design skills and understanding of Internet marketing trends. Experienced webmasters know how to grab the attention of visitors and make them want to stay on the site and explore it.

Web development skills

An experienced web developer should have excellent programming skills and knowledge how to use programming tools. Their main objective is to provide a customer’s website with all needed functions and features. It’s a very rare case when one and the same person can be both an excellent web designer and web developer.

What’s more important?

According to the research, visitors usually judge a website in just a few seconds. That’s the reason why it’s important to make a website attractive and easy to use. Effective web development is expected to give the site useful and interesting features and functions. The best way solution is when a web designer and web developer work together to grab more attention and encourage return visitors. What’s more important? There’s no definite answer to this question. Both trends are equally important if you’d like to produce an effective website.

Actually, everyone could be a web developer. And it’s a very true statement. It’s not such a difficult job to build a website (and especially if there’s no need to pay for the tools). What is difficult is to be a good web developer. A good web developer has to meet the following criteria:

• He should know that it’s absolutely possible to work without specifications. As a matter of fact, he has to be ready to cope with large volumes of projects, in which there’s just no time to create such documents.

• He also should know that the most important thing in his job is to build a well-functioning project and use the simplest and the cheapest possible technologies, as fast as it can be done. Why the easiest technologies? Because time is what’s important. Why is important? Because there’s a big number of other firms that could do similar job much faster than you and thus, they can easily abduct your potential clientele.

• He has to be aware of the latest trends, love Internet and be interested in it. That’s a very important prerequisite of web developer’s success. He simply has to love Internet and be interested in all the stuff related with it. Good web developers have accounts on various social media sites so that they can keep up with the latest trends and Internet technologies.

• You won’t be a good developer if you don’t like to learn new things, read tutorial and documentation. From time to time new releases of popular tools, programming languages and technologies should be studied and tested by good web developers.

• A good developer is supposed to be on good terms with SEO. SEO is a very important part in web development. Therefore, a good web developer should be able to build a good website for the search engines.

• Good developers know how important image optimization is. If the site takes ages to load, it’s probably not a good website.

• A good web developer should know the differences between the major web browsers; and here I’m talking not about cross-browser compatibility (that’s the job of a web designer) but about those differences that make one functionalities possible on the website and others not.

• A web developer is expected to know at least one programming language. PHP is a must thing. Why? Because there is a big number of websites built in PHP, because WordPress is created in PHP, because it’s easy to find hosting for PHP, etc. The more programming languages you know, the more opportunities you’ve got. You can actually choose what language would ideally meet your new project requirements.

In this article I decided to reveal fundamental rules that webmasters should learn and respect if they want to make proper money. The companies that plan to hire a web development studio or a webmaster can use these rules as their main tips in choosing professionals.

So, if you’re ready, I will start off slowly.

1. Please, don’t resize the user’s browser. It’s a web technique that’s usually used with the spam sites. You shouldn’t do that if you want to build a successful web project.

2. If a visitor has to load your home page first and then go to the new pop up page, you lose. Don’t forget that you’ve got only a few seconds to grab your visitors’ attention. If it takes longer than that, it becomes a challenging task to retain users, no matter how cool your website is. This technique is mostly seen in practice of flash web developers. But you should realize that every second plays an important role. Don’t waste your time and let your site load instantly on the home page.

3. A website created all in Flash is the right way to disaster. If your web design company creates such a website, fire them right away. It goes without saying that flash is a great and powerful tool but only to deliver animation, shopping carts, video, interface. Flash websites are not seo-friendly. They aren’t read by web crawlers and thus, badly visible in the search engines.

4. Don’t “reinvent the wheel”. Here I’m talking about navigation system. Place it on the right, left or top side of the site, but don’t make it complex so that people cannot interact with the interface. The easier it is to find the needed item on the site, the more chances you’ve got to sell your products.

5. If you’ve got music on your website, make sure your visitors can stop it. It would be even better if it didn’t start playing without being requested first by a user. The same rule should be applied to the video with audio. Keep in mind that a big number of users surf the Internet from their offices and loud unexpected noises would be absolutely inappropriate.

The process of creating a website requires certain creativity. The concept of the site should be meticulously thought over and it should have some zest to be different from the others. But the rule is to be sensible. If the website looks overwhelmed with creative ideas, visitors may feel lost on entering such website because it would be quite complex to quickly find what they have initially been interested in.

These days, web design is highly demanded on the Internet. It’s not just about creating web pages, but also managing all the content and other elements on the site. Web design procedure implies execution of several tasks by web designers, web developers, seo-optimizers and other specialists depending on how complex and specific the site is. The development process usually starts with the in-depth analysis of the client’s requirements, the goals of the website, discussion of the budget and general client’s involvement in the process.

But it doesn’t absolutely mean to say that client’s job is finished here. No way. A client has to have a clear understanding to what he expects from his website and what he would love his customers to see in the future. The web pages should capture visitors’ attention instantly.

If a customer participates in the web development process of his project as it’s been described earlier on, he would greatly help a web designer in developing a high quality website. If you don’t want to have any misunderstandings, you need to be ready to closely collaborate with the team of professionals so that they can deploy the desired project to meet your business objectives.

When all the information has been told by a client, webmasters can start to carry out the conception and technical tasks of the site.

The purposes of the websites are different. People design a site for a big company, to buy or sell items, to advertise things, for entertainment or promoting themselves. People can host their sites using free or paid servers. The difference would be in their reliability. Paid servers are usually much more reliable but they do require certain fee per month or year. However, if a person is a beginner in his business niche than he doesn’t necessarily have to go for a paid server.

Websites are created not only for big businesses but for everybody who’s got something to share with others on the Internet.

Drupal is a free and open source content management system which is written in PHP. Drupal is also recognized as one of the best Award Winning open source framework which started in 2000. The interface of the cms is somewhat confusing and complex for the beginners, as Drupal uses modules to rapidly arrange the content on a site. The novice administrators and users generally go for more basic platforms such as WordPress or Joomla. However, as a matter of fact, the more advanced users can easily develop a site, blog or forum within a short time-scale due to the modular structure of Drupal content management software which is undeniably a distinct advantage. Therefore, it’s entirely up to you whether you want to use Drupal cms or not.

Regardless whether you intend to hire an expert to maintain your site or you will rely on your own knowledge, I would definitely recommend this powerful content management software to develop your site. At first, you can basically develop any type of a site including communities sites, forums, blogs etc. At second, your site is going to be always secure. Being an open source system, Drupal is regularly updated and modified with the help of the communities of web developers. Regular updates are an essential part of secure website functionality. No attacks or threats from hackers will compromise your site safety.

In general, Drupal is a prominent platform to create a site in any web industry. The platform is in use in 228 countries, and it displays the content in more than 187 languages. The numbers are quite impressive and convincing. Drupal runs a lot of websites including government sites such as whitehouse.gov and data.gov.uk. It’s always been improved due to the consistent check-up of the developers. Automatic notifications emerge when a newer version or update is available so you can get access to the new features and extensions.

Drupal cms is also SEO-friendly. However, to achieve the more efficient results, the administrator should regularly change or refine the content to improve website traffic and furthermore rankings.

If you’d like to hire an expert who could provide high quality drupal web development for your website, please, contact me today or send a free quote. I will be happy to help you.