CHAPTER 7

Comparison of Web Development

Everyone has its self-definition of different technical web development terms.

Are you one of them who is curious to know the differences between a variety of web development terms?

This chapter describes such vital aspects where you will get answers to all your questions.

Here, you’ll be able to have brief but proven explanations of web development, programming, front-end, back-end, full-stack, mobile development, UI/UX design, and software development.

Continue to read ahead to wash off all your doubts!

In essence, web development is not alone. It’s a fool-proof combination of programming, front-end development, back-end development, and web design. All these aspects are different from each other but still work together in collaboration with technologies to carry out quality web development.

Here, differentiating all these terms, corresponding to web development, is quite necessary.

Web Development vs. Programming

On a simple note, web development is the most crucial subset of programming. Web developers are programmers, but not every programmer is a web developer.

Web Development vs. Programming

Programming

Programming is the process of writing computer programs. You can also consider programming a small piece of software that is developed using some predefined logic and executed by the web developers to get the desired results.

Programming is a complete web development, but don’t perceive that it’s limited to web development. It also helps build a variety of web applications or software using different suitable languages and technologies.

Web Development vs. Web Design

Nowadays, both (web development and web design) terms are virtually interchangeable that confuse many individuals and business owners. Mostly, the confusion arises when someone starts the search for the best web development and best web design company.

At this point, it’s mandatory to see and grab the difference between both of these.

What is the difference between web design and development?

Web Design

In a nutshell, web design refers to both sides of a website, including the aesthetic and usability portions. Web developers use different software and tools such as Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator to achieve a successful web design integrated with beautiful layout elements.

Web Development

IWeb development, on the other hand, works on creating and injecting actual functionality to a website so that it can run flawlessly at the users’ end. Undoubtedly, users only see and use the impressive interface of the website, but, in reality, they don’t know that the look and feel they consume is all because of the programming and scripting languages like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript that helps developers bring life to a web design.

Web Development vs. Front-end Development

Briefly, the front-end refers to the client-side of a web design. And a website can’t get the aesthetics if it doesn’t have a perfect front-end.

What is the difference between front-end and back-end web development?

Front-end Development

Front-end development focuses on making a website worth navigating and highly-interactive for users. It has nothing to do with hardcore programming, but yes, it’s deeply related to the aspects of a website that users generally see and interact with.

Though front-end also uses HTML, CSS and, JavaScript to give architecture to a website but to purely stylize a web interface. Fundamentally, the front-end is everything that is involved with the process that the user sees and consumes through a website.

Back-end Web Development

Front-end is one of the essential sides of web development, making the process complete and ready for the end-users. Remember, web development is not limited to only front-end development; there is back-end development that also plays a significant role in making web development a full-fledged process.

Web Development vs. Backend Development

Web development is a complete term, but still, it’s incomplete without back-end development. So let’s discover the role of the back-end in web development.

What is the difference between web development and back-end development?

Back-end Development

Backend web development explains the importance of architecture planning and implementation on a website. It’s the other most important part of web development apart from front-end and is considered a support system of any web interface.

If you call someone a back-end developer, he/she will be responsible for building the back support of a website, meaning the functional development and implementation to make a website easy to use and navigate.

Developers use different programming languages and technologies to carry out back-end development successfully. Popular back-end languages are Ruby on Rails, PHP, Python, .NET, etc.

Web Development

Web development consists of everything. No matter if it is front-end or back-end. Whenever you hire web development services, you inevitably get a full-fledged web application, which is integrated with all the required front-end and back-end aspects.

Web Development vs. Full-stack Development

Web development in itself is a complete term to define the building and structuring of a website. But sometimes, it also does not include everything that is needed to complete the process.

What is the difference between web development and full-stack development?

Full-stack Development

Full-stack, as the name suggests, is the complete development where both front-end and back-end aspects are involved. When someone is called a full-stack developer, he/she possesses the knowledge of working on both front-end and back-end technologies and programming languages.

A full-stack developer needs to have a clear picture in their mind about how to conceptualize and implement a website development process.

Web Development

A web developer can only be a front-end or back-end developer. Here, suppose you’re planning to build a full-fledged website. In that case, you will have to hire individual front-end and back-end developers who are professional and have hands-on different programming technologies.

Web Development vs. Mobile Development

There is a huge misconception among people that native mobile apps and web applications are the same - but in reality, both of these are entirely different. Not only from the users’ point of view but there are also differences between them from development aspects.

How different is mobile app development from the web?

Mobile Development

Mobile applications or native mobile applications are built for some specific platforms such as Android and iOS. These apps are downloadable and can easily be available and accessed via an app store. Further, the device (smartphone or tablet) also supports these apps by allowing them to access the camera, GPS, and other required functions.

Also, developers use the latest mobile app development languages and technologies to develop these languages.

Web App Development

On the other hand, Web applications are simple applications that anyone can easily access via the Internet. These are highly adaptable and fit the screen you’re using to view the app. In addition, web apps are not native and don’t need to be installed or downloaded from any particular platform.

The best thing about them is that the applications look and function like mobile apps due to their responsiveness.

Web Development vs. UX/UI Design

Again, there’s a big confusion in these similar-looking terms UX and UI as both are important and deeply related to web design.

How is UX/UI design different from web development?

UX Design

UX design generally stands for User Experience and tends to be an invisible part of the website. It’s the process of creating a website or app to make it functional. UX design includes user research, information architecture, interaction design, content strategy, and usability testing.

It needs to be done by keeping the below aspects in mind:

• Needs
  
• Habits
  
• Behaviors
  
• Emotions and;
  
• Motivations

Following the facets, help create a more user-oriented user experience of a web or mobile application.

UI Design

Opposite to the UX, User Interface or UI is the graphical or visual representation of a web design. Sometimes, UX designers also act as UI designers to help create interactive web layouts.

So, if you’re looking to hire UI design services, you need first to search for a web design professional who possesses knowledge of graphic design, color theory, strong typography, photo direction, and vector manipulation. In short, UI design is the primary aspect that brings life, motion, and interactivity to a web design.

Web Development

Web development, in this sense, is referred to as the combination of UI and UX as one makes a website functionally robust, and the other is responsible for improving user-interactivity for the same. You can see both of them as the best components of web development.

Web Development vs. Software Development

Computer programming has overgrown in the past few years, and to describe it, many terms have been introduced and used. But still, some people are in the dilemma that software development and web development are the same, or is there any difference between them.

What is the difference between Web Development and Software Development?

Software Development

Software development emphasizes building software programs for computer systems. Therefore, it comes with a lot of work that includes code conceptualization, creation, documenting, programming, testing, improving, and maintenance. To accomplish such tasks, developers use many programming languages and interrelated technologies.

Software development generally requires building stand-alone mobile and desktop applications. One more thing is that these software solutions can only be accessed by a limited number of users that need to run a few activities via that particular app.

Web Development

Web development, as it has already cleared the sense, uses the code to create interactive user-facing solutions in the form of websites and web applications.

Web development also requires code to build and run user-oriented interfaces. The difference is that these can be accessed by any type and number of users looking to grab relevant information.

We tried to bring everything to the table to clarify your confusion about different web development facets.