ASM Development - taking websites beyond design

Do You Need Web Design Or Web Development?

There is often a little confusion when it comes to web design and web development. There is a simple explanation of each – web design is all about the aesthetics of your web site while web development is all about your web site’s functionality and usability. In simple terms, a web designer should be a part of your web development team. A web developer should not be a part of your web design team.

They are both important roles. Aesthetics are what initially grabs the attention of a visitor. If your site looks good then a visitor is more likely to stay and perhaps even dig a little deeper into your site. It is this deeper digging that interests a web developer.

Web developers look at issues such as internal links, shopping carts and the way data is transferred from a web page to a shopping cart and payment processing system, and details such as page load times just to name a few. The person in this group, of course, is the SEO professional who works with both the designer and the developer to ensure that each page is optimised to its fullest for the search engines.

As part of a team, this triumvirate can produce great pages that catch the attention of visitors, are easy to use and navigate and rank very highly in search results. Is one more important than the other? Look at it this way:

• a great looking page that few see and those that do find impossible to navigate;
• a page that ranks well but looks awful and is hard to navigate;
• a page that ranks poorly, looks awful but is easy to navigate and use

I could go on with any number of combinations – in each case, you would have worthless web site. If each component does its job well you will have a web site, and a business, that should flourish.