Web Development Vs Web Design – Want To Know The Difference?

Web designing and Web development are used interchangeably so often that one forgets that they are technically two different functions. Adding to the confusion is the increasing number of businesses that promote themselves as Web Development Company as well as Web Designing Company.

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This blog post on web development Vs web design will delve into the two realms of website creation and elaborate on the differences between the two.

Web Development Vs Web Design

Before we go into details about web development and web designing, let’s take a quick look at the major differentiators between the two aspects of website building.

Web Design Web Development
Deals with the aesthetics of the website – the look and feelDeals with building the backbone of the website –factors and attributes that contribute to the function and performance of the website
Transform a concept into a visually-appealing layout Transform the design into a functional website

What is Web Designing?

As described above, web designing involves creating the look and feel of the website. A web designer creates a wire frame or layout based on the client’s preferences and specifications.

Read Also: Top 10 Web Development Companies In India

The wireframe will give a general idea of how the final page will look like. Once all the stakeholders approve the wireframe, sketches and mock-ups are created. These sketches and prototypes will give a precise picture of the final product.

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From the size and type of font to the colour palette of the web page, every design aspect is finalised during these stages. All these design aspects play a vital role in making the website attractive to the visitor.

Aspects of Web Designing

The process of web designing doesn’t simply end in creating a mock-up or choosing a background theme and typography. The various aspects of web designing include:

  • Creating a website format and layout that delivers the best user experience
  • Building the website prototype
  • Working on the graphic designs
  • Coordinate with website developers to convert design ideas into features
  • Creating web designs using CSS and HTML

Apart from these common tasks, specialist web designers focus on specific design tasks such as:

User Experience (UX) – It involves creating a web interface based on audience profiles and demographics.

User Interface (UI) – It involves building a foundation to improve user experience by incorporating elements for easy site navigation.

Visual Design – It combines both the elements of user experience and user interface to conceptualise the website’s unique brand and style.

Elements of a Web Design

While creating the visual design, web designers focus on the following design principles:

Balance – This principle elaborates on the need to use the right proportion of small and large elements, dark and light colours, and other elements to create a balanced web design.

Contrast – This principle is based on the colour theory that states that complementary or contrasting colours are placed opposite each other. Designers use contrasting colours, textures, shades, shapes and other elements to create an attractive page

Consistency – It is a critical design principle that ensures consistency of colour, design and layout across all the web pages of the website. It also ensures consistency with the brand image, logo and mobile app.

Unity – This principle involves building a relationship among the different elements of the web design to create a cohesive theme that grabs the attention of the website visitor.

Emphasis – This principle involves “emphasizing” on certain design elements to make it stand out on a web page to grab the attention of visitors.

Design Tools for Web Designing

The commonly used tools for web designing are:

  • Illustrator
  • Sketch
  • Dreamweaver
  • AI
  • Adobe Photoshop

What is Web Development?

Web development involves the use of codes to convert a static layout created by the designers into a dynamic functional website. There are two types of web developments – front-end development and back-end development.

Development that includes both front end and back end is known as full stack development. Front end development or building the user/client side of the website involves creating the interface and building the interaction between the backend of the website and the user.

Read Also: Top 10 Exceptional Movies and Documentaries for Web Designers

Front end web development bridges the technical aspects of web development with the aesthetic elements of web design. The backend of the website is the hardcore technical aspect of the website, or in other words, the backbone of the website on which the rest of the elements are woven around. 

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Front end web development bridges the technical aspects of web development with the aesthetic elements of web design. The backend of the website is the hardcore technical aspect of the website, or in other words, the backbone of the website on which the rest of the elements are woven around. 

Front End Website Development

JavaScript (JS), Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) are the three major programming languages used to create the front end of the website.

It also includes using content management systems (CMS) like Joomla, Drupal or WordPress to streamline the entire development process and ensure seamless functionality.

Bootstrap, jQuery, and React are some of the frameworks used in creating the front end of a website. It also includes use of styling pre processors and JavaScript libraries.

The popular front end web development tools are

  • jQuery
  • Angular JS
  • Sass
  • Sublime Text
  • Chrome Developer Tools
  • GitHub
  • Twitter Bootstrap

Back End Website Development

The backend of the website is also known as the server side of the website and involves gathering accurate data based on the actions happening on the front end. It determines the architecture of the website and focuses on the script and the database.

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The server side is coded using programming languages such as Java, Python, PHP, ASP.NET, Node JS, C#, C, C++, and more while the server database is built using MySQL, Oracle, SQL and Mongo.

The tasks involved in building the backend of the website are:

  • Writing codes for the server and database interaction
  • Ensuring server-side code is secure and error free
  • Optimizing server-side code to handle the large volumes of traffic that the website expects to have
  • Implementing algorithms

The essential tools for backend website development are:

  • Programming languages such as PHP, Perl, Java, Ruby, Python, Erlang, Node JS and more
  • Web servers such as Nginx and Apache
  • Database management systems such as MongoDB, PostgreSQL and MySQL
  • Local development environment such as XAMPP, Wamp Server and Laragon to run and test codes before making them live
  • Website performance testers such as Full-Page Load Tester and Google Page Speed Tester
  • Microservice platforms such as Kubernetes and Docker

Many small and medium businesses that want to create an online portal look for web development and web designing services. Whether you are looking to build a new website or revamp your existing online portal to give it a new life, you can consult us.

Read Also: 25 Stunning Website Designs That Will Blow You Away

We have in-depth experience in website designing and development and can give you the best value for your investment. Contact us right away to create a stunning website for your business.

We have in-depth experience in website designing and development and can give you the best value for your investment. Contact us right away to create a stunning website for your business.

10 Robust PHP Frameworks For Developing Your Web App

Web and mobile application development may be a time consuming and complicated process, however, using a framework can help you get the job done efficiently.

These frameworks are useful for developing web applications, mobile applications and websites irrespective of complexities and sizes, be it small websites or a large scale enterprise.

Known popularly for web development and as a server-side scripting language, Frameworks aid in long-term maintenance by conforming to development standards while allowing your application to evolve and advance over time.

With these frameworks, web developers can now develop and set up more compound and safe web applications easily.

Why PHP Framework?

As a framework, PHP has been widely adopted by various developers around the globe and has sustained this well-deserved position for over a decade.  Developing web applications without using PHP code has become nearly impossible. A PHP framework comprises of various security policies, methodologies and components, and codes that are useful for different purposes. There are multiple PHP frameworks available, and we are here to throw light and discuss some of the best ones for 2018 that would hopefully be of use in your projects.

Yii framework

Yii is known to be a highly efficient PHP framework with powerful caching support. Yii goes along with the MVC pattern and aids in developing a clean and reusable code. Yii is equipped with a collection of validators along with helper methods and widgets. It supports and is compatible with Memcache, APC, Xcache, DB based page and segment caches.

For PHP, Yii is a remarkable open source web development framework. Wherever repetitive tasks are necessary to be done in developing applications for systems this framework works best. This web development framework features an inbuilt database abstraction layers, component-based model, modular application architecture and event-driven programming features.

Laravel

A name that strikes our memory when we discuss PHP frameworks for web app development is Laravel. It is a free, open-source PHP web framework, which adopts the model-view-controller (MVC) architectural pattern and is intended for building high-tech web applications. Laravel features many useful components such as utilities that aid in application usage and continuance, a complete packaging system with a dedicated dependency manager, various ways for retrieving relational databases, and its orientation toward syntactic sugar.

CakePHP

CakePHP has gained wide popularity in the market since its commencement, and it is an open sourceweb development framework written in PHP. It is developed on the ideology of model-view-controller and association data mapping. Professionals can efficiently utilize CakePHP to build web applications in an organized and rapid manner. A practical advantage of using CakePHP is that guidelines and in-depth documentation are accessible along with the framework which enables simple and secure coding.

Symfony

Symfony is a PHP framework that is known for its stability in usage. It is an ideal choice for large-scale and complex ventures and projects. The current version, Symfony 3.1 offers scalability and flexibility to developers while creating websites that can adapt to changing business requirements. Symfony is equipped to function with quite a few of the most prominent open source platforms such as PHPBB, Piwik, and Drupal.

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Code Igniter

Developers highly prefer code Igniter due to its simplicity. Because of its smooth and straightforward functionality, it helps in the seamless advancement of app development. It also hosts a vast collection of functions which are very useful to the developers to help them complete the development process much faster. These library functions offer developers an added advantage as they do not have to build any code from scratch. As Code igniter doesn’t hold any commercializationpolicy, there are no advertisements and no necessity for a subscription. This framework offers simple solutions to complicated application requirements.

Zend framework

Zend Framework is best suited for quickening up the web application development process as it hosts an ideal collection of essential components required for development. It is highly flexible and also offers scalability. This framework allows for easy customization and low maintenance as well. With the help of Zend PHP, developers can build larger projects within a short duration. Compatibility with different databases such as MySQL, SQL, Oracle, and others are known to improve the productivity vastly featuring plenty of third-party plugins.

Phalcon

Phalcon is a full stack PHP framework that also utilizes the Model-View-Controller (MVC) web architecture design pattern.  It was built on the C and C++ programming language and is the fastest PHP framework known today. It is one of the most advanced frameworks created keeping in mind the speed factor.

Slim

Slim is a PHP framework that is simple yet powerful and enables you to develop efficient web applications and application programming interfaces. Slim is minimalistic in design and is a PHP micro-framework. Thus it is apt for small and straightforward web applications which don’t require a full-stack PHP framework. Many PHP developers also use this framework for developing Restful APIs and web services. It comes with attractive features like client-side HTTP caching, URL routing session and cookie encryption, etc.

FuelPHP

FuelPHP is a flexible and full-stack PHP framework. Even though it follows along the MVC architectural pattern, it also provides an extension by evolving its adaptation called HMVC (Hierarchical Model-View-Controller). FuelPHP is a modern and extendable framework. It presents inputs and URI filtering and output encoding that handles security policies. It comes with rich features and good documentation along with its authentication mechanism.

PHPixie

PHPixie is entirely new in the web development world with its conception in 2012. It was created with the aim of establishing a high-performance PHP framework keeping in mind read-only websites. PHPixie framework is very much similar to FuelPHP in implementation and adapts the HMVC architecture design pattern. It was also developed using independent components. These individual components can function without the need for the framework, and they require minimum dependencies as they are 100% unit tested.

We are sure that the above discussed PHP frameworks can be put to use efficiently and build web application efficiently and with more ease.