Most people interchange the use of the two terms – web design and web development, but they are in fact two different aspects of web site creation.
Web sites can be created in many ways. Let us help you understand some key terms and methodologies so that next time you talk with a web creator you are more on the ball so you can make better decisions.
HTML websites
The traditional way to create a website was to just code the whole site in what is termed “flat HTML”. HTML is of course the basic language that a website is created in. And even today with the more complex websites, they are still predominantly made up of HTML code. HTML stands as most know for, Hyper Text Markup Language. It is a simple language that allows your web page to be displayed with a browser – like Firefox or Internet Explorer.
These days web creation has become a lot more complex but the foundation is still the same – HTML.
Flat HTML does have the core benefit that it will usually display accurately in most browsers and browser versions. Cross browser compatibility is one of the key problems faced by modern web creation experts or web developers. Firefox, Opera, Internet Explorer and Chrome are just a few of the popular browsers available.
AJAX websites
Shortly after the creation of HTML a second language was created that allowed web developers the ability to add more functionality to a website. This language was called Javascript. The programming language was interpreted inside the browser when you opened the web page. This is called a ‘client-side’ script. Javascript gave web developers the ability for example to validate input data inside a HTML form. So when a site user entered data in a standard HTML web form the data could now be checked. HTML did not allow for this type of functionality. Javascript has been developed over the years and special terms were developed to describe certain types of advanced functionality capabilities. AJAX was such a term developed a few years ago. AJAX is fundamentally just advanced Javascript.
JQUERY
JQuery is simply an advance of AJAX. The web never stands still so additional Javascript-based functionality has been added and the latest browsers can now display and process some very neat and creative scripts that are now superseding Flash in most new sites.
Flash
Adobe Flash had a very long run in the Internet game and was a tool of choice for many web developers for a number of years. Web development with Flash created some amazing interactive and creative sites. Flash took the web platform to a new level. Like many Internet technologies though they get superseded. Flash is now being dropped by many web development companies because of it’s rendering limitation in hand-held and portable devices such as mobile phones and i pads that many are now using to view websites with. With the massive growth in hand held web viewing JQuery is fast becoming the tool of choice for developers who want to build a robust site that will be viewable on more platforms while retaining fairly high levels of practical interactive functionality. Flash was a great tool but sometimes web developers would overdo the flash elements when web users would simple want to find information or do a simple online transaction. For web-based games though, Flash still remains one of the tools of choice.
CMS websites
A CMS (content management system) is simply a collection of web pages that are tied into a database to store the information. A database driven or CMS website has the distinct advantage of user changeability and addition of content. While a standard user can update a HTML website they have to know quite a lot about web development to be able to successfully update a HTML based website. Whereas with a CMS, if you have MS Word skills and basic web browser skills, you will be able to update your website using the simple interfaces that a CMS gives you.
Two common web databases are MySQL (open source free database software) and MS SQL (from Microsoft so license fees are payable for its use). The most popular database of course is the free one – MySQL. MySQL is an industrial strength database system.
Do be warned though, that some CMS user interfaces are a nightmare to use and the CMS data structures are so complex even advanced IT engineers have challenges working out how to update and add content in the right way. Some large corporate websites use very complicated CMS’s for no apparent and sound reason. The reason is often that they hire companies to create custom CMS systems for them so the end result is a poorly executed data structure with poor user update functionality.
On the other hand, if you use a very polished CMS like WordPress or Drupal, then you will have a different experience. We tend to use WordPress as a CMS of choice for many of our clients websites because of its easy user interface. It is a fairly easy CMS to use especially if you are just adding or editing pages or blog posts. With one hour basic training, an average computer user can grasp most of the system functionality.
Joomla, another popular CMS on the other had will take an average user eight to ten hours to gain the same level of competency.
Drupal is a different beast all together from WordPress or Joomla. It is a commercial grade industrial strength fully scalable CMS. It’s powerful and flexible data structures allow it to be used to create any corporate website. This is our CMS platform of choice for large corporate sites that require flexible data representation as well as rock solid reliable content delivery and management. Allow yourself twenty to thirty hours to fully get your head around Drupal.
The difference between web design and web development is simple
Web design is the pretty stuff! It is simply the look and feel of a website. The colour scheme, the font type, the menu button designs, the page layout structure – 1 column, two columns, two columns and a side bar etc. – are all part of the web design arena.
Web development on the other hand is the process of putting all the pieces together. Web development takes the web design elements and then uses them mixed in with HTML, XHTML (HTML on steroids), AJAX, JQuery, XML and SQL to produce a final masterpiece website. A modern day web development professional has to know a lot of different technologies to produce a final site that will work on different browsers. Our own team spends most of their web development time trying to get the sites they have created work properly on all the major browsers.
Web platforms
A web platform simply relates to what computer hardware and software is used to run your web server. A web server is a computer that is connected permanently to the Internet (it can also be used to run an internal company website not connected to the Internet – this is called an Intranet).
The web servers function is simply when you type in a web address to serve you the web page that you have asked for. So when you type, www.seo-magic-webs.com our web server sitting in Singapore will look for the web page you have requested, it will load it into its computer memory and then using the software running on the web server, it will process any special code (server side scripts) and then send this file to your browser so that you can see the final web page.
The two most common server platforms are Windows and Linux. Windows is again licensed so the server hosting company has to pay license fees to Microsoft where Linux is free and uses open source software originally based on the industrial strength operating system Unix. The servers (physical computers) run a piece of software that allows it to process your web page requests. On Windows based servers this software is called IIS and on Linux it’s called Apache. We always put our clients on Linux because it is easier to control the SEO elements using a system file called htaccess.
Server Side Scripts
To finish off this article lets discuss server side scripts. Web development used to be very simple in the pure HTML days, but now web development is super complex with layer upon layer of different technologies.
Server side scripts are simply software written to run on the web server itself. This means that the script or programming language is NOT visible to the final web page viewer. So if you viewed the page source of the web page you are viewing, you will never see any server-side script, only what is called client-side script – eg Javascript.
Scripts that run on the server allow for things like database processing. So for example a server-side script could go to a database pick up all the latest products, then send this to your browser as a HTML table. All you see on your browser is the final formatted HTML. Server side scripts can also do complex calculations, thus hiding the source code form you so that the code is protected from being stolen and copied.
The two most common server side scripts are ASP and PHP. Again ASP is Microsoft’s server based technology and runs on IIS using MS SQL databases where PHP is open source, runs on APACHE and uses MySQL databases.
So that concludes this article on web development and web design. We are a leading web design and development company. We focus in CMS systems using PHP technologies, and seeing we are a SEO company first – all the SEO elements come built in right from the start. Contact us today for a competitive quote on your next web site development or revamp. Our in-house team of designers and developers are ready to take care of your project.
