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Web designers vs Web Developers

You may have heard the terms 'web designer' and 'web developer' and wondered what the difference is, if there's a difference at all. Web design and web development are two different disciplines: A web designer will typically deal with the 'front end', which includes the visual aspect of a website, the HTML and the user experience, or UX.

The web developer will be responsible for the 'back-end' which means they will write server-side scripts that result in any functionality the wbsite might have. There is overlap though, and often a designer will be capable of developing and the developer will be happy designing.

The web - what is it and how do I access it?

The World Wide Web or 'Web' for short is a network of web pages that can be accessed via a huge network of computers known as 'The Internet' (note the difference - the two work together to allow people to access online resources, but are not the same thing!). The internet allows computers to connect with each other and display content from one (a server) on your connected device.

'The Web' was born in the mid-1980s, the brainchild of Tim Berners-Lee, a physicist then working for Cern, and was conceived as a way of sharing resources remotely via hyperlinked documents. It was launched to the public in 1991 along with the first 'browser', a program that interprets web code and presents it in a user-friendly way, allowing anyone to access any of the documents linked via 'The Web'.

To access the web and all of its bounty, you need a device capable of running a browser, a browser itself, such as Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox or Safari and an internet connection. To view a website page, someone with all of the above needs to open their browser and type in the 'domain name' or URL (uniform resource locator) into the 'address bar' to go directly to that website, or if they don't know the URL, or to browse a number of websites relating to what they're looking for, they would navigate to a 'Search Engine', Google or Bing for example.

Search engines are programs that continually index what's available on the web, using small programs knows as 'spiders' or 'robots' to scour the web for any files they can find, reporting back on their content and other information contained in those files (webpages, images & other documents) and the search engine then records that information and uses it to categorise websites, ranking them on their relevance and quality in order to decide which sites to show you when you search for any given 'search term'.

Originally, webpages were limited in what they could do, and were simply a way of sharing information with limited interactivity - a far cry from today where they are fully immersive and an integral part of each of our lives, to the point where internet access is now considered a basic human right!

How have web technologies evolved with time?

The web is built on several technologies working together to produce the dynamic resource it has become. But what are these, and how did they come about?

The basic building block of the web is a markup language called HTML. This enables content to be presented to the user in a particular way using 'tags'. Without it the web simply couldn't function. HTML was introduced as an experimental technology in 1992, allowing web designers to build a page using text, images and a basic framework to share information to users browsing remotely from their computer.

Mosaic was the first browser to be released, and despite it being launched eons ago in web technology terms, it is still recognizable to a user of a web browser today. Opera and Internet Explorer soon followed, as did HTML2, an evolution of HTML. In a relatively short space of time HTML3 and HTML4 were introduced, and included significant input from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) in order to ensure that competing interests from involved parties wouldn't compromise the technology.

HTML4 would become recognized as THE version of HTML for the next ten years because of this, the '4' was invariably dropped in favour of just 'HTML'.

Meanwhile, Javascript, Java and Flash were developed and launched to allow greater complexity in the design, animation, interactivity and functionality of websites. CSS was then introduced to separate the content of a webpage and its styling. Several other browsers followed, including Safari, Firefox and Chrome, and small updates were made in the guise of XML in the following 10 years but it wasn't until 2008 and the introduction of HTML5/CSS3 that HTML made a serious leap forward. HTML5 gave the designer and the user even more scope for dynamic, interactive client side content, running natively in the browser, Flash having been long since phased out due to its reliance on a third-party plugin.

Maddison Creative web design Newcastle were founded in 2009

Today, the main driver of technology change is the increasing number of devices that browsers use to access websites - mobile phones, tablets, touchscreen devices - all dictate how websites are built, replacing the once ubiquitous desktop browser.

Web development and web design - what's the difference?

To build a fully functional, beautifully designed website traditionally requires a web developer and a web designed working together, to cover off all aspects of the design and build. While it is true that a lot of developers are comfortable designing and a lot of designers are comfortable developing the two disciplines are distinctly different:

A web developer is primarily responsible for coding, server-side, in order to allow the website to function. This can include managing the server and the transfer of files and additionally some client-side scripting such as Javascript, but it is predominantly programming.

A web designed on the other hand is responsible for the aesthetics of the site, along with the user-journey and experience. This may also include client-side scripting such as Javascript and HTML, but it is traditionally about the design and layout of the page, imagery, colours, branding and user behaviour.

Can you update and develop my existing website, built by someone else?

Yes, not only can we build you a website from scratch, but we can also work with what you already have to increase performance, update any branding you might have, or bring the technology up to speed. Essentially we can give it a new lease of life!

My content is the main reason people visit my site - why should I invest in getting my web design right?

The internet is so vast, and you more than likely have so much competition that potential customers can afford to be very selective, and will happily jump from site to site if they don't get instant gratification. The average time for an internet user spending on any page is just 11 seconds, so the opportunity for you to persuade them that your site is worth hanging around in is very limited. Eleven seconds isn'tsufficient time to convince them using copy alone that you're what they're looking for, especially since they're attempting to digest the entirety of your page in one go, and so you need to make the most of other devices at your disposal. This makes your design, and the visuals of your site absolutely vital to the sucess of your site.

Another study has shown that two thirds of internet users, when given their eleven seconds would much prefer to read content that is beautifully designed rather than content that is plain, hence the need to perfect your design along with your content, and another study suggests that around 40% of internet users will instantly navigate away from a page if the pictures are either broken or take too long to be revealed, highlighting the need for imagery to break up the monotony of your text. 38% of users also said that they will instantly disconnect from what a website is trying to communicate with them if the site is poorly designed.

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