What is website design?

Website Design and Development is the process of designing a number of pages, for display on the World Wide Web. This collection of web pages is referred to as a website.

Designing a website consists of different elements like images, text and overall layout of a web page. The overall layout plays an important part as it affects the user experience.

Good vs Bad Web Design

What is Web Development?

Web development is the process of adding interactivity and functionality to a website through programming.

A standard website consists of a few web pages with a navigation menu interlinking all pages. This is the job of a web designer.

An interactive or advance website would have eCommerce features built in for online shopping or database functionality for keeping records. Institutions like schools or hospitals are good examples of clients who need database features for record keeping.

This is where a web developer comes in. A web developer is one who is well versed in computer programming and is able to write scripts which add functionality to website design. With added functionality, comes additional cost. See the difference in pricing between Standard and eCommerce Websites.

What are the elements of a good website?

• Good colour schemes.
• Good layout.
• Easy to navigate

Well optimized website that loads fastMobile friendly websitesSEO Optimised web pagesAdding fresh content regularly

Good colour schemes - I have been to sites with red background and yellow text. I clicked the back button immediately.

Good layout - First impressions count. Visitors should be able to know their way around at a glance.

Easy to navigate – There should be a standard navigation menu which remain the same throughout the whole website.

Well optimized website that loads fast – Common reasons for slow websites are badly programmed scripts and unnecessarily large images.

Mobile friendly websites – This is to design websites that can be view on any screen size from phones, tablets to desktops. If your website is designed using a CMS platform like Word Press, Joomla or Drupal, it would be mobile friendly.

SEO Optimised web pages – The idea here is to design web pages optimized for one keyword each per page. This is for the purpose of ranking your website in search engines. A good web design company would be able to incorporate good SEO practices in their web page design.

Adding fresh content regularly – Regular visitors would know when a site has not been updated in a while. New visitors would realize a site has not been updated when the information on it is outdated. Websites which have not been updated in a while will slowly drop in search engine rankings.