The notion of web designing has been staying constant as long as the websites have shown their existence. There used to be a simpler definition to it because website creation earlier used to be a much hassle-free process. Nowadays, building and taking care of a website has become a creative process as it involves an entire ecosystem composing roles and expertise.
What is Web Development?
Website development is a term that defines the method of creating a website. As the name advocates, it includes two highly required skill sets namely web design and web development. Web design ascertains the appearance and purpose of a website whereas web development defines its functioning. As there isn’t always a clear term that differentiates both roles, the titles are usually used to swap each other.
What is Web Design?
To define, a Website Design focuses on the looks, appearance, and sometimes on the content of a particular website. For instance, the looks of a website are associated with the colors, text, and images that have been used to provide information. A perfect web design is easy to operate, artistically charming, and fits the targetted audience along with defining the brand of the website. Many web pages are crafted with a central focus on clarity so that irrelevant data and components that might divert or confuse users can be eradicated.
What Should be the Goal for Web Design & Development?
The design of a website must be created keeping in mind the target audience and the designer must ensure that it provides a good user experience. Additionally, there are a lot of other perks of getting a great website designed not only for the business but for the audience as well. Moreover, here are some benefits of having efficient web design & development:
1. Business Envisions
The merit of using visual content is that it provides the audience with clarity about the product of the company. Moreover, when the site has images, it easily catches the consciousness of the readers or the visitors. Before going through the text, the audience is often excited about the picture. This enhances the prospects of getting more users inclined to the website.
2. Easy Accessibility
A website’s accessibility refers to the permissions that depend on the owner to enable or not. A key merit of making accessibility the first concern ensures that all users are able to approach and equally make use of a website and its functions. Overall, it is essential that the website is easily available and accessible from anywhere and everywhere. Companies providing exclusive web design and development services assure to care for this inescapable contemplation.
3. Power of SEO
Nowadays it has become a concern that the website design must be SEO-friendly. The design of the website has a great impact on the SEO and it plays a key role in positioning the website in the search engines. Nevertheless, the website must be very receptive and should perform in the best way on all types of electronic devices. For creating a website that is SEO friendly, the designer needs to concentrate on different features such as linking structure, design of landing page, assignment of action buttons, and website navigation.
What is the need of Custom Web Development?
With the above-explained snippets, it is clearly evident that web design and development are very crucial facets of any digital marketing strategy. So, it gets imperative to handle all the operations, design and build out of a website flawlessly. Similarly, nowadays the trend of getting the website designed as per the need has increased and for the same reason clients look out for a Web Developer that will fulfil all their needs and requisites. Here’s how custom website design can prove to be advantageous to companies:
1. Attractive Designs
With a customized website, there’s no room for a definite theme. The website’s construction depends on the fondness of the client and has no limits on the website’s appearance. It means that it never happens that two websites are built alike. A type of uniqueness arises when a custom website is curated. It, therefore, differentiates the client’s site from their contenders permitting businesses to build their site through their customer’s journey and focus on the design and development.
2. Improved speed
The speed at which the website loads is very critical for any business. Custom curation of the website permits companies to refrain from useless functionality and bloatware completely. Additionally, in order to steer clear of avoidable functionality, creating each and every function for the site allows businesses to boost not only the operations but also the designs for these functions, further improving the speed of the website.
3. Website Security
It’s a matter of fact that security is immensely crucial for any website that comprises sensitive data. The key notion here is that many businesses that build websites according to preferences also host these websites for the customer so that the hosting environment gets optimized for the security of the hosted websites as well as the applications.
However, it gets necessary to account that the total cost of getting a custom-built website is quite higher as compared to other alternatives available in the market. Although, in the long run, getting a website built as per the preferences for the business and customer needs can turn out to be more cost-effectively in contrast to open-source software and also helps in inducing higher sales.
How Web Design & Web Development is different?
Well, until now it is evident that there are innumerous perks of web design and development. But, one thing is still left out. Do many people wonder that is there any such difference between web design and web development?
So, yes. However, the terms web design and development are used together but they have a vast array of differences. Below mentioned are some of the key points that differentiate both the terminologies:
1. Tools
As the web developers function with programming languages such as HTML, CSS, and Javascript to build websites and web applications. Also, they use software tools such as text editors, command-line interface, and version control to create the technical information refer to as the codes that represent the data.
The work of web designers includes the usage of tools such as sketch, adobe photoshop, and illustrator that are used to design a website. They have exemplary graphics and logo design skills. Eventually, they design the format of the website by crafting prototypes and wireframes.
2. Responsibilities
An efficient designer has a great role and responsibility to analyze their client’s objectives, forecast, and brand image as they just have the verbal or written idea of what their clients need. After that, they work on the idea and change it into a known web design. Overall, the accomplishment of any project given by the client mostly depends on the web designer who initiates everything in the project.
The responsibility of web developers involves the process of coding that makes the website function well. Their work involves building programs and applications in order to bring functionality to web designs. Moreover, the developers concentrate on three cores of coding; namely the client, the server, and the database.
3. Skills
Key skills of a web developer include having corporate and communication skills in order to coordinate with designers, the marketing team and other members. Also, they must have mastery over substantial programming skills and software languages, like Structured Query Language (SQL), Python, development of Java server, machine learning, the development of APIs for interacting with objects, and many more.
On the other hand, Web designers must have strong training regarding the fundamentals of art and design. They must acquire mastery in designing applications like Adobe Dreamweaver, JavaScript, and scripting frameworks for multi-feature front-end applications. Furthermore, designers must assure that the products they curate should fit the brand of businesses, be it from logos to color schemes.
Elements of a Successful Website
Building a website is more than just graphic design and web development—it also encompasses fields like SEO, User experience, digital strategy, and content development. Users keep coming back for more because of the intersection of these diverse fields of knowledge combining for a genuinely entertaining, useful, and powerful website. Your website should help your business grow, not impede it. Let’s look at the various aspects that make some websites more popular than others, whether you’re planning a website redesign or just need a refresh.
1. Start with Strategy
It may seem obvious that you should start the web development process with strategy, but this is a field that is often overlooked. So, before we get into the technical aspects of building a website, we need to think about the big picture—things like priorities, markets, branding, and calculation.
Establishing Website Goals
There’s probably a reason you’re working on a new website. Is it necessary to make changes to your website in order for it to represent your new brand? Will the company be able to handle a major change? How do you improve your conversion rates?
It’s typical for websites to be designed without a specific target in mind, which leads to a bad user interface, bloated web design, and a low conversion rate.
amplification Setting targets early in the process informs the digital strategy and serves as a road map for critical decisions about site content, user flows, and architecture. Is your website affecting your revenue? If not, it’s likely that it’s due in part to a lack of specific goals.
While determining your goal can begin as a large-scale exercise, it can also be applied on a smaller scale, such as individual pages. Asking yourself, “What is the intention of this page?” is a good exercise. and “Is it possible for a user to take action?” If you can’t figure out what your content’s intent is, chances are your user can’t either.
Define Your Audience
Target markets, including priorities, should be defined and conveyed to the team. The overarching plan that drives the site’s information architecture, how to better accomplish the site’s goals, the site’s content, and, of course, the UX/UI design is informed by identifying this information as early as possible.
In some cases, businesses may need to prepare for different audiences. A university website, for example, would need to communicate with prospective students, current students, different departments, and alumni.
What if your target audience is made up of a wide range of people and you don’t have access to more detailed demographic data? This is where analysis can be extremely beneficial to your company in obtaining information about your customers. For example, surveys, market research, and competitive analysis are all viable options.
Brand
This may seem self-evident, but you must ensure that your brand is well-defined. Brand guidelines keep everyone on-brand and encourage those with less experience (think freelancers or agency partners) to hop in and out as required.
Measurement
Last but not least, you’ll want to make sure you’ve considered how you’ll assess performance. This is linked to your objectives, but it goes a step further to ensure you’re collecting data correctly. Do you have the correct tags set to fire? What method is being used to monitor this conversion? Is the data in Google Analytics accurate?
You can now move on to the enjoyable part, assuming you have all of these fundamental elements in place.
2. Digital Strategy
There are a lot of factors that go into making a great website, and many of them overlap. UX and content management, for example, have a big impact on SEO, and UX encompasses everything from information architecture to web design. There’s a lot to unpack here, so we’ll focus on the major players.
Website Architecture
Anything from your website’s sitemap, homepage, naming, and categorization conventions, to the different content types you have on your site, information architecture is the structural design of your site’s information hierarchy.
Well-structured information architecture not only aids policy, but it also has a significant impact on user experience and SEO (as I previously stated). Better grouping of relevant pages and subjects results in a more intuitive user interface, which helps search engines prioritise your site.
The navigation on your website is the most visible example of information architecture.
Is there a way to streamline and better match top-level menu products with the company’s main goals? Is the navigation hierarchy logical, or does it need to be reorganised? These are crucial questions to ask at the start of the process because approaching them later in the project can be expensive.
User Experience (UX)
The core user’s needs and concerns are at the centre of good UX design. Study, user testing, policy, audience, purpose, knowledge architecture, graphic design, and promoting interaction are all factors to consider.
A good user experience is unlikely unless all of the above components are working together. The user is, of course, at the core of user interface design. It’s important that your company knows everything it can about its customers.
One way to predict consumer needs and challenges is to build user personas for your ideal customer. You may also look at analytics data to see how UX updates have affected the site’s metrics.
SEO
SEO is the product of several different elements working together, from page load speed to UX and content. When it comes to web creation, make sure your team understands how search engines crawl and index pages, how clean code and other elements can impact page load speed, the types of content you’re producing, and the keywords you’re aiming for.
You should also be aware of SEO developments on top of all of that. Google’s algorithm is notorious for being constantly tweaked, and the advent of voice search is on many SEO experts’ minds. Both of these factors must be taken into account during the production process in order for the final product to be something that both search engines and consumers can enjoy.
Content Strategy
Marketers continue to speak about the famous “C” term. We’ve all heard the phrase “content is king” a million times. And, to be frank, it’s real.
It’s one thing to create a strategic, user-centered, and visually appealing website; however, how can people learn about it?How do you create a long-term traffic strategy for your website? There are certainly opportunities between your site’s SEO, digital ads, and social media channels, but you also need to be producing valuable and meaningful content on a regular basis to help push such initiatives.
Instead of thinking about content as an afterthought later in a web design project, start thinking about it now. Many companies make the mistake of creating a blog on their website without a strategy to keep it posted and current. It’s a struggle to keep up with content marketing. It takes years to create anything like this.
3. Web Design
When influenced by strategy and user-centered thinking, the visual layer of a website can boost the entire brand experience. Design decisions can have a big impact on the efficacy of your digital strategy, how well you interact with your audience, and how well you handle complicated problems on your website. Great web design can also help tell stories, and when combined with important, relevant content, it can educate, entertain, and delight while also helping to achieve commercial objectives.
Here’s everything you need to know about it.
UX/UI Design
User data, company goals, digital strategy, user flows, and other factors all contribute to great user experiences. While it’s true that having a website look nice is important, outstanding UX designers also make it intuitive, useful, and simple to navigate. In an ideal world, you’d have both, but visitors will abandon even the most attractive websites if they can’t locate what they’re looking for.
Accessibility
Google has made a drive in recent years to make websites more accessible to people with disabilities. This applies to anything from text to images (for example, no grey text on grey backgrounds). Even if something appears amazing to a designer, it’s important to follow accessibility procedures to ensure that everyone can read and navigate your site.
Mobile Friendly Design
Almost everyone nowadays owns a smartphone. That implies your site must be mobile-friendly and optimized. Is this to say that you must adopt a mobile-first mindset? that depends. It might not make sense to think mobile-first if your users usually visit your site on a desktop. Users will access your site via mobile devices in either case, so keep that in mind.
4. Web Development
Last but not least, there’s web development. We won’t go into too much detail here, but we will touch on some of the most important aspects of building a great website.
Page Load Speed
How fast your site loads won’t necessarily make your site, but it can break it—Google, your users, and almost everyone else in the world prefer fast websites. Longer page loading times can be caused by large image files, videos, and inefficient programming. Test your own site and come up with a solution with your DevOps engineer or developers.
Web Hosting
There are many different types of hosting available, but web hosting is the most significant for things like security and resource capacity when it comes to your website. The level of sophistication of your website, the amount of traffic it receives, and how you manage it will all influence which hosting service is best for you.
In summary, hosting is an entirely different world. It can be tempting to go for a cheaper option, especially with so many $5-per-month options available. But first, educate yourself and make a selection that will keep your website secure and able to withstand traffic spikes.
Conclusion
Designing on the web entails more than just creating something appealing to the eye. That’s a huge part of it, but the final product also needs to operate well for consumers across platforms and achieve business results. If a new website just achieves one of these objectives, or omits even one, it is just not good enough. When web design, digital strategy, and web development are all combined, the result isn’t just appealing. It’ll also be effective.
At last, it can be said that web design and web development are accurately two sides of the same coin which means that one is incomplete without the other. Unless they work together, it gets difficult to attain a good website. In a nutshell, it is very important that both web developers and designers must have a singular goal in mind to get the required result.
And that should be to build a vibrant website for brands that charm users in every best way possible. In order to attain this objective, web designers and web developers work in a pristine fusion. Moreover, each website requires proper functioning in order to get presented at its best and be truly successful.