Web development and web design are not quite the same thing. While the two professions do have some overlap, web developers typically focus on how things work while web designers focus on how things look. In other words, a developer is responsible for building the structure of a site while a designer is responsible for colors, branding and layout.
 

Website development generally requires more knowledge of programming languages and web designers might be able to get away with relatively less knowledge. There is web design software that can help you design a website with no coding understanding.
 

•  Types of Web Development
   

Because web development is such a multidisciplinary field, developers usually specialize in either front-end or back-end development. However, skilled developers may be confident enough to tackle full-stack web development. Here’s a closer look at what these types of web development mean.
 

1. Front-End Web Development
 

In front-end web development, the focus is on user-facing parts of the site. Developers code the parts of a site that users see and interact with, including mobile iterations of the site. This is the area of web development that has the largest overlap with small business web desinging, as both tend to work on user interface (UI) and experience elements. However, it’s front-end developers who bring designers’ ideas to life.
 

Front-end web developers usually use a mix of three programming languages, which we’ll go into more in-depth below. HTML helps them structure content while CSS allows them to define typography, colors and layout. Finally, JavaScript lets them control the dynamic parts of the page, such as forms, animations and pop-ups.
 

Additionally, to implement designs, front-end developers have to test and fix bugs that might appear throughout the procedure. It is also essential for them to structure the website with the best SEO practices by improving load times, optimizing schema markup, adding picture tags and prioritizing mobile formats.
 

2. Back-End Web Development
 

If front-end development encompasses user-facing features, then you can probably surmise on your own that back-end development focuses on behind-the-scenes features. Users never see this part of a website and for good reason—it’s a confusing array of databases, application programming interfaces (APIs) and programming languages.
 

Back-end developers make sure that a site is functioning as it should by maintaining and organizing the databases that hold the website’s content. Often, they’ll build these databases from the ground level to up, create queries to help search for specific sections of data and take measures to keep the data secure.
 

Setting up websites on a server, establishing user authentication and configuring networks and hosting are also part of a back-end developer’s responsibilities.
 

3. Full-Stack Web Development
 

Full-stack web development is the combination of front-end and back-end web development. As you might guess, this is a complex field that requires expert developers proficient in a broad range of programming languages and technologies. Full-stack web development needs you to have a thorough grip of the entire development process from all sides.

Because of the level of expertise needed in designing both the front end and back end of a website from start to finish, these types of developers tend to be a jack of all trades.