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Web designers vs Web Developers

You may have heard the terms 'web designer' and 'web developer' and wondered what the difference is, if there's a difference at all. Web design and web development are two different disciplines: A web designer will typically deal with the 'front end', which includes the visual aspect of a website, the HTML and the user experience, or UX.

The web developer will be responsible for the 'back-end' which means they will write server-side scripts that result in any functionality the wbsite might have. There is overlap though, and often a designer will be capable of developing and the developer will be happy designing.

Where are Maddison Creative Web Design Newcastle located?

We are based on Tyneside - more specifically in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Tyne and Wear in the North East of England, United Kingdom.

What does my business need to do in order to develop our own website and what will the process involve?

Every brilliantly successful website starts off with a brilliant idea. Whether your idea is to fill a gap in the market, a way for you to earn a living, whether it's to satisfy a great need, or whether it's a product, a service or some form of entertainment, the idea is the main reason that your website will succeed or die a slow painful death. You need passion, a great team, discipline, hard work, of course you need all the tools available to you that a website will afford you, but if your idea is a dud then if will ultimately all be for naught.

Once you've completed all your planning, you know what constitutes success and how you're going to measure it, you've done your market research and have the funding in place you can then think about how you're going to make the next step of anctually getting online. These days it is definitely a question of how, and when and not if - the internet has become so fundamental to the success of a business that not to have a website is not really an option! It's at this point that Maddison Creative Web Design Newcastle get involved and provide support with industry expertise, over a decade of launching websites, and an in-depth knowledge of what can be achieved, what works and what doesn't, best-practice, what you will require to acheive your goals, timescales and costings.

Once that's all been agreed, the next step is generally for us to come up with a site structure and a visual (usually flat without any functionality) to give you a feel of how the website will look. Once these two have been agreed and signed off, then we set to work combining the two, and hey-presto! You have yourself a website.

From a logistical perspective, to build, launch and maintain a website, you need a domain, ie www.something.com, space on a server which can be provided by a hosting company , you need your website files, and you need a program to allow you/us to transfer your files onto the server. and you need the files you create. Once they're up there then your site is live for ayone to enjoy.

We can take care of all of this - it's what we do. We've built relationships with some of the best hosting companies to get your the best deals of hosing and domains. We use cutting edge FTP software to transfer your files quickly and securely. All this is included in any of the packages you can get from Maddison Creative Web Design Newcastl, so you needn't worry about it.

If you already have hosting or a domain and you'd prefer to keep it, then it's not a problem - we can work with what's there, transferring over anything we need and talking to providers to ensure that everything we need for your site to work beautifully is there.

What about good web design and Search Engine Optimization?

Search engine optimization, or SEO is the process whereby you make your site as finely tuned as possible in order to ensure that Search Engines such as Google and Bing consider your website worthy enough to show ahead of all the competition.

This involves writing the content in such a way that it relates to the words (keywords) your potential customers will be searching to find whatever it is you're doing/selling/saying. It also entails making sure that all the key elements of what makes up a good website are there and put together properly. Titles, images, framework of your site, links - they all have to be right.

This also includes things you can't see - the invisible tags that sit behind your webpage, but that do an important job nonetheless. A good web designer will do all of this as a matter of course, but there's always room for improvement, especially as time marches on, and best-practice and guidelines change and what used to be the done thing is now frowned upon.

Websites and the web - what are their origins and how have they advanced?

The web is built on several technologies working together to produce the dynamic resource it has become. But what are these, and how did they come about?

The basic building block of the web is a markup language called HTML. This enables content to be presented to the user in a particular way using 'tags'. Without it the web simply couldn't function. HTML was introduced as an experimental technology in 1992, allowing web designers to build a page using text, images and a basic framework to share information to users browsing remotely from their computer.

Mosaic was the first browser to be released, and despite it being launched eons ago in web technology terms, it is still recognizable to a user of a web browser today. Opera and Internet Explorer soon followed, as did HTML2, an evolution of HTML. In a relatively short space of time HTML3 and HTML4 were introduced, and included significant input from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) in order to ensure that competing interests from involved parties wouldn't compromise the technology.

HTML4 was to be the standard for around ten years, and its presence was lengthy enough that the '4' was almost universally deemed unneccessary and it was know simply as 'HTML'.

Flash, Java and Javascript were released, allowing website to feature more engaging and interactive content, and CSS came about to separate the styling of a website from its content. Chrome, Firefox and Safari were launched to give users greater options when choosing a browser software with which to browse the web. Incremental updates were made to HTML in the form of XML, but it wasn't until 2008 that HTML made a significant step forward with the release of HTML5 (and CSS3) gave the web designer a greater number of tools with which to build interactive, engaging, dynamic, immersive websites, which run client-side and which run natively in the latest generation of browsers without the need for any plugins.

2009 saw the launch of Maddison Creative Web Design Newcastle.

Currently, the primary driver of innovation change in the web industry is the advancement of mobile technology and the number of users who are choosing to consume web-data on-the-go using a handheld, touchscreen device. This has had a significant impact on who websites are designed and built.

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