Design vs. Development
You'll probably find the titles "Web designer" and "Web developer" used interchangeably, but this isn't accurate. Designing a Web site is actually very different from developing one.
There are two major components to designing a Web site: the "front end" and the "back end." While there can be quite a bit of crossover, for the most part design refers to the front end, development to the back end.
Front end and design
The front end is what your customers see: the "pages" that display the graphics, the images, and the text on your site.
Web designers concentrate on the front end, choosing appropriate images and fonts and determining how images and text should be arranged.
A Web designer's strength is his or her appreciation for aesthetics. A designer doesn't have to be a technical whiz. But one should at least have a strong understanding of what will work visually on a computer screen and what the technical limitations are in designing for the Web.
Like the designers at Mason Designs, a good Web designer will also have experience in collaborating with a Web developer.
Back end and development
Developers are part of a new breed of Internet professionals who can help you build your Web site. Web developers work on the back end, making a site work. This side of the process is not visible to visitors, but it is essential to enhancing the visitor's experience.
Back end functions include making images change or move, allowing visitors to view different pages or enter data about themselves, or performing sales transactions. If you're hiring a Web developer, learn to speak the language. Make sure any developer you consider has the following skills:
- HTML for the text and layout framework of a Web page
- Web Imaging to create and compress images for the Web
- Javascript to write programs that run as part of Web pages and to do tasks like validating form fields before submitting a form
- ASP to customize a Web page for a particular user on the server before it is sent down to the user
- Java/C++ to write programs that are embedded within a Web page - to do things that Web pages alone cannot do, such as playing a game within a Web page
Whom to use?
Mason Designs!
If your heart is set on a kick-ass design that puts your competitors to visual shame, the designers at Mason Designs will get the job done.
Or say you want to include complex e-commerce transactions that require special programming skills. The developers and programmers employed by Mason Designs are top-notch.
