Web design and development has existed as long as the websites themselves. In earlier days however, it used to be much simpler than it is today. Even the whole process of website creation was comparatively simpler than what it is today. If you compare the modern websites with the first website that came in 1991, you’d be able to tell that creating a modern website is much harder and requires a whole lot of skills. This implies that the modern designer has much more to handle than the previous ones. Let us go through some of the major aspects of website creation and the skills that may be involved in it.
Web Design and Development
Web design and development is the whole process of creating and designing a website. This requires two major set skills. One is being able to design a website and the other is being able to develop it. The design implies the outlook of the website while the development implies its functioning. Though both of these terms are used interchangeably as well. Considering the whole thing keeps evolving with time, the skills required to handle them evolve as well.
Front-end development and back- end development
The two main categories of work that web designers have to deal with is what’s visible to the users and what’s not visible to the users.
What’s visible to the users involves the overall design. This is what the viewers see once they access the website on any browser. This may involve the website color, layout, fonts and images as well as its branding. This may require working with tools like Photoshop, Illustrator and other tools that may aid in the overall outlook.
Things that are not viewable to the visitors involve the back-end development. These are the coding languages like HTML, CSS, and Javascript. These work in the background to implement the front-end design. The languages work in the back end to ensure that the users can interact with the text, images and other navigation menus. They ensure that the website has a responsive and adaptive design.
A back-end development is necessary to ensure the proper storage and organization of the date that comes through the front end. Information is entered on the front end and stored in the database at the back-end. This means that both the front and the back ends of a website work simultaneously. The harmonious communication between them ensures the proper working of a website. This requires the databases and servers to work with languages like Ruby, PHP, Python and with frameworks like CodeIgniter and Ruby on Rails.
Elements of Web design
The main elements of websites include
1. The layout of the website
2. The visual hierarchy of the website
3. The color scheme of the website
4. The navigational tools of the website
5. The graphics of the website
6. The accessibility of the website
7. The speed of the website
Conclusion
Building a website nowadays is much more complicated than it was earlier. There are a lot of roles to play while designing a website and each role complements the other. This involves roles like learning coding languages, maintaining a working website, improving user experiences and having the knowledge to deal with issues that may come up. Web development and designing is all about continuous learning and dealing with problems. This is why many people consider hiring web development services to handle this task more efficiently.
