Do You Need Website Design or Website Development?
If you use the Internet on a regular basis you have probably noticed the wide variance of website design; some are your plain vanilla type websites; white backgrounds with black text and very few if any graphics while others are distinguished by their heavy reliance on graphics such as flash animation.
Website Design
Generally the tasks required to create your Internet presence is viewed as an aspect of web development. You will find individuals who are web designers, those who are web developers along with those who claim to do both. But even though both of these terms are used loosely to mean the same thing, there is a difference between website design and web development; in short website design takes care of the look and web site development makes the little work with the search engines and Internet technology.
Although flash animation websites are extremely popular these website designs are notoriously subject to be bypassed by search engine spiders because they can not read imagery. Regardless of how much text is within the flash animation it will not be able to be read. Because of this limitation, without web development there are many sites which never appear on the search engines.
When you understand the limitations of using flash animation or other graphics you can develop workarounds that are content-based to balance the impact of the graphics. Website design can be as unique and creative as necessary to reflect the business image and produce a visitor friendly experience at the same time.
Web Development
At its best a well-thought out visual presentation will provide what is required to be cross-browser compatible. This one factor alone can make or break your level of success with an online business. If your website design is not at this level, web development services can correct this problem.
Although the graphical elements include the navigation bar, the navigation process; how a visitor travels through your site is accomplished through a variety of development methods. For instance internal page hyper links, breadcrumb links, site maps and the search function all play a role in connecting your visitors to your content.
The way content management is presented is also a part of web development; the use of HTML tables as part of the website design process is much more a flue than most people realize; HTML4 tables were never intended for the purpose of bringing continuity to website design, this is the purpose of using cascading style sheets or CSS, to bring continuity of style and design to the website in an easy to edit format. The problem with using HTML4 tables from a search engine spider's point of view is the additional lines of coding that are required to read when tables are used.
Because there are millions of websites indexed on a monthly basis search companies program the spiders with a certain amount of time to crawl a page, read the code and index it. Whether or not a designer uses W3C compliant techniques is one of the most factors to consider when creating your Internet website.
