What is the difference between a web designer and a web developer, a website and a web application?

This morning, I found a telegram text from a friend of mine. What were the contents of the text? you ask? Well… nothing new. It was a familiar question he is used to asking: “You said you are a good web designer?”. This question has been asked me I don’t know how many times!! I always answer “yeah”. But back in my mind I know I am not!. Come on Simon… you mean you are lying to this guy that you are a web designer? NOT AT ALL! There is something more.This is not the first person to ask me that question. Many people have been asking me such questions. These people, however, confuse between a web designer and a web developer. If I was to ask that question for him, I would have asked: “ Simon, you said you are a good web developer” And I would have said yes! This brings me to today’s topic of discussion: What actually is web design? And is it different from web development? And what's the difference between a website and a web application?

Well, I will go straight to the point. A 'Web design' is to a website what a plan is to a house and a web designer is to a website what an architect is to a house. Did you get me right? Let me narrow down using this analogy. You want to build a house. Right? Don’t say yes or no because this is just an example I am giving. So, since you want to build a house, you need a plan of that house. And so what do you do? You go to an architect and explain to him the kind of house you want. The architect after listening to your description will draw a plan for you. That is a mock-up(an example of the house you want but just drawn on a piece of paper). So, you take a plan or design of your house. The real house will look exactly the same as that house on the paper. So, what do you do to have your real house? You look for a civil engineer who will begin constructing that house to completion strictly based on the plan of the house the architect drew. Now, lets come to the real thing. A web designer versus a web developer.

A web designer is like that architect who comes up with the plan of a house. A web designer uses graphic design tools like photo-shop, Coreldraw, inks-cape and others to come up with a design of a website. After designing, he gives out an image format of a website(necessarily a picture but can also give a pdf file or HTML(don't worry if you don't know this). Remember this is an image/file. It is not the real website/web application. But it is a photocopy of what the website/web application should look like after being developed by a software engineer/software developer.

A web developer on the other hand is equated to a civil engineer in the analogy above. He comes up with the real functional website/web application. He listens to what the website should do, designs a database for that website, works on the back-end(This the functionality that happens without the users knowledge on a website/web application ) and front-end(Things that happen as users interact with a web application(Like when you are doing an online application for a job, after entering your details in the online form and then you click submit button, then a pop-up text tells you that the form has been submitted successfully). This person is called a software engineer/developer. He has knowledge programming languages and writes the computer code to implement the kind of functionality represented in the design.

Now, let us finish by looking at the differences between a website and a web application. Many people call a web application a website. Someone will come to you and tell you he/she needs a website. But when you tell them to explain to you what the website should look like in terms of functionality, you find out that the client is actually referring to a web application and not a website. In layman's language, a website is a simple site mostly for display purposes and little of back-end functionality(some maybe database driven while some not). Like a website where users can just register and login . Well, this is my opinion, according to experience and extensive research I usually do. A web application, on the other hand, has a very complex back-end functionality and it is mostly database driven. By back-end, I mean the things that happen behind the user’s knowledge. Like, let me use this website that is well known by many people. HELB website. You will call it a website but it is a web application. If you visit it, as a student you are presented with a login form where you input your details. If the credentials you entered are not right or you forgot your password you won’t be able to log in. But why? What happens in the background without many people’s knowledge is that when you enter your details and click the login button, the website checks if your details are registered in the HELB database using your email or username. If you are registered, it further checks if the password and the email match. If they do match, it will redirect you to student's dashboard, if not, it will throw an error, most likely ‘the email and password do not match’ or something of the sort. Now, in case you have logged in successfully and now want to apply for a loan, you are taken through step-wise application. Remember as you proceed from one step to another, there is a script that runs in the background without the student’s knowledge that saves the data into the HELB database. After the application process, you submit and get a form containing the questions you have been answering and what you actually wrote. Which you are required to download and it awards the serial no. to your form, automatically. All these are done by a program that is written and works on the server and so you can't see what is it doing. All these details are saved in the database and they use this serial no. to identify the applicant. This is a simple explanation of what a web application looks like. You can see how complex it sounds. Yet it is a simplified explanation of what goes on. Its like 5% of what actually goes on in the backend. A website like Facebook is a very complex web application. That should give you the differences between these misused words and phrases in technology. If you have any question, addition, correction or concern, just comment below and I will answer!