What Is Web Design?
Web designing encompasses all the visual parts of any web application. Whatever you see on a web page within a web browser is properly aligned and has a good user interface because of having a good web design. Web designers focus on the design and UI part of a web application such as how the content will appear, what will the main header menu contains, what will be the theme of web application and overall what the flow of the whole application will be. This all is thought before the project or application development phase actually starts, for this purpose web designers need to grasp the requirements of the application very clearly and based on these requirements present a minimum viable product or a demo app which mimics or highlights what the actual application will look and feel like.
Web designers work hand in hand with project managers and the customers as well, to be sure at every step of designing that the created design meets expectations and is okay with management or the client.
What Is Web Development?
Web development usually is a vaster term than web designing. A web developer applies or creates the logic that is needed for the application to be functional. Most web developers have the know-how of web designing as well, hence one such web developer can fill these two places. Web development is where all the logic of the application is created such as what data manipulation will happen in the application, authorizations in the app, using custom plugins, integrating databases and serving the application over the web. Web developers are more in demand these days because of the nature of their work. Most web developers know how to design but they prefer not to unless it becomes essential for them to design by themselves.
Otherwise, web designers or UI experts come in to help. The web development process is the main process in the creation of a web application and many sub level processes come under the umbrella of web development.
Difference Between Web Design And Web Development
The main difference between both can be that a web designer will generally not know much web development, as they purely focus on design. This designing can also be done through various tools that are available these days in which you never really get to see any code. A web designer can certainly master any such tool for web designing and be the best at what they do, but they will always be a designer in the end and will have a very hard time implementing some custom functionality that might be required.
Web developers, on the contrary, have exactly these skills to create custom functionalities and integrate them with already created design. Since most web developers know web designing too, this gives them an upper edge over web designers as now their skills become a superset of web designing skills.
Demand For Both In The Industry
Currently, there is a demand for both in the industry. Although pay scale is different, web developers usually earn more than web designers, but their job is also usually more complex and time-consuming than that of web designers. Web developers keep tackling new bugs almost every single day, and with time newer bugs keep rising in the application, this means, in theory, the web development process for a long-time customer can be ever going (or at least a few years). Whereas web designers present an initial design to management or customer and get some feedback, make some tweaks than the customer or management agrees to stick with the design.
The demand for web designers and developers will always be there and increase over time. But recently we have seen more demand for web developers than web designers in the market, this is because of new frameworks and libraries that big companies keep introducing and others adapt, such as Angular or React.
How To Become A Web Designer Or Web Developer
You become a good web designer or a good web developer by learning over the web. Nothing beats the practical approach in the learning process. In terms of both web development and web designing, you can easily see any changes that you make within the browser almost instantly. This helps to catch the problem in a much earlier stage and reduces the chances of failure or more bugs in the future.
When deciding to become either of one or deciding to become both you can always check out online courses and tutorials. In web development, the two main parts are front end development and backend development usually a developer is one of them. Front end development is closely related to the UI and designing part, and backend development relate to databases, the online server on which the web application is hosted and usually structural configuration of the application. A full stack developer is one who knows both backend and frontend development, he has experience on both sides of development and is mostly self-taught by courses such as full stack web developer bootcamp online.
Which Career Should You Pursue?
Pursuing any one of these careers totally depends on your personality and personal preferences. If you are a creative person who is more into the design aspects and find computer programs very confusing, then probably the best among these two for you is web designing. Web designing is more focused on being creative and coming up with visually pleasing results.
On the other hand, if you are a natural problem solver and like puzzles and logic building exercises then you should step into web development as web development domain itself has a lot of problems to be solved. As a web developer, you will always keep learning new and ingenious ways to solve logical problems more efficiently and in less code, hence your knowledge will be ever-growing. But not really much people fit in this role, only the ones who are determined to adapt new skills and face new challenges head on every day. If you think you have the stomach for that then web development will be fun rather intriguing for you.