Why must web Design & Development go hand in hand?
Web design & development are two essential components that bring a website to life. But most of the time, they are created by two different people or a team, with contrasting ideas about the website and its features. It's crucial to implement a streamlined process where all the parties involved are aligned and working towards the same goal: A website that’s functional, attractive, and provides the best user experience possible.
Let's first understand what web design & development are!
What is Web Design?
Web design refers to the design of websites that we find on the internet. It encompasses many aspects, some of which take care of the appearance and layout of the website on desktop and mobile devices.
- Appearance: Colors, imagery, fonts, and other elements.
- Layout: The way the content will be displayed, structured, and categorized.
What is Web Development?
Web Development refers to building websites with the help of coding languages from scratch and maintaining them throughout time. It's everything web developers take care of for the website to look its best and perform fast.
Web development is normally divided into three categories:
- Front-end: User-facing element.
- Back-end: Server side.
- Full-stack: Takes care of both front-end and back-end development.
Web Design Vs. Web Development
In many cases, these two roles are confused and thought of as the same. This is because now, web designers must know development elements, and web developers must understand aspects of design. Hence, these two roles should create synergy to avoid any hiccups in the implementation process.
But, to understand why web design & development must go hand in hand, it is fundamental to know how they are different.
What are the differences between web design & development?
Even though web developers and designers share a common ground, there are significant differences between their roles. To make it simple, here are three responsibilities of a web designer and three for a web developer:
Three Essential Web Designer Functions
- Design the look and feel of the website: Choosing the theme, color, font, images, and others.
- Create animations and features for the website.
- Creating mockups of the websites.
Three Essential Web Developer Functions
- Builds the site from the ground up: Coding the site to make it work.
- Turns the ideas and plans of the web designer into reality.
- Takes care of troubleshooting problems on the website.
Why must web design & development go hand in hand?
During the past years, the lines between the responsibilities of web designers and web developers have blurred. Instead of defining them once again, agencies take advantage of this phenomenon and work with the best of both worlds.
There’s still a dilemma between having the entire website design ready before developing or if both should work together during the process. Depending on the way you work or the timeline of your project, you may decide on one or the other.
Why should web designers and developers work together? Here are three simple reasons:
1. Creativity.
Two minds always think better than one! Joining forces between designers and developers from the beginning of the process is a recipe for success. This will allow the creative juices to flow and create reasonable ideas that developers can implement.
2. Exceed client expectations.
Having outstanding ideas and actually being able to come through will ultimately impress your clients greatly. Many agencies promise innovative and unique ideas, but in the end, they’re not able to implement them due to compatibility issues.
By working together with an established workflow, web designers and developers will take those innovative ideas and turn them into reality, always striving to wow the client. When the process becomes smoother and quicker, you’ll be able to deliver quality products on time.
3. Decrease delivery time.
Even though some fantastic ideas are out there, sometimes the platform you’re using does not allow you to fulfill them. Suppose web designers and developers put their brains together in the the early stages of the process. If so, they’ll avoid hiccups along the way and having to rethink their designs due to incompatibility.
Web design & development are essential elements of the entire web creation process. Uniting these two roles and allowing them to work together will provide better designs, reduce time, and ultimately impress your clients. Even though they are two different elements of web creation, they must work in synergy to gain the best results for the client.
David Vargas is a trilingual (Spanish, English and Russian) Interactive Designer specialist in web design, web development, and game development. David has more than 5 years of experience designing and developing websites. For him, the base of every design or any development project are creativity, imagination, and inspiration. As David says “behind the magic and the wow of every project are design and development hand in hand”.
