Web Site Design and Development : How are Different

When building a web site, there are two basic tasks involved. The first is the design of the web pages itself which is called web design. The second is how to link between these pages that are designed in the first step and forward pages according to user requests and the data received by the user.

The first task is the web site design. As stated above, it involves designing the site pages. The designer here deals mainly with the HTML code. This language is used to build the web pages and it is the primary language of course. The responsibly of the web site designer is to design a layout for each page of the site. For example, the designer may determine the placement of images, videos, advertisements and the main content for the page.

Before beginning to make the design process, each element must be known of course. The designer must be aware of what the pages will contain. After knowing the page contents, which can be images, ads, banners…etc, the designer will look at the layout of the page. Thus, the designer acts as a coordinator for the elements of the page. Also he may receive the elements that will constitute the page as blocks without knowing its details. He may just coordinate it.

The elements that form the web page are web languages which can be different than HTML code. It may be JavaScript code, Flash or any client language. Note that the term web page element is used here to represent any code that is executed by the browser on the client side. Below, server side code will be explored which forms the web site development task.

The second task of the web site design is the server side programming development. This is called simply web development. Once the designer completed the web pages design, it is the role of the programmer to design the program that link between these pages. This is true for interactive sites that include forms filled by the user. When the user fills the form and click 'submit', the client sends the request to the server to analyze the data. It is the role of the web developer to write the programs that process this data and send back a page accordingly.

Let us take a simple example. If a site has a page that collects username and password and send back to the server. The site has to process the data sent by the client. It will have two choices for the server. If the username and password is correct, the server will send a "successfully logged in" page. Otherwise, it will send "error" page which will contain again the username and password fields to be entered again by the user.

In the above example, determining which page will be sent back to the client is by the program written by the web developer. This program is server side because it is executed by the server. The server side program has two main roles. First it process the data sent by the client. Second it picks the proper page from the pages available that are deigned by the web designer and send back to the client. Moreover, it may write dynamic text to the page that sends such as the current date.

Many server side programs exist that perform the above operations. The most common languages are the PHP, AS.NET, and JSP. These languages are put directly in the page within the HTML code but with remarkable tags. When the server finds their tags, it will execute them. These languages are called also scripts. Remember again that the above languages are server side languages. This is because there are also client side languages that are executed on the client host by the browser.