Is there a difference between web design and web development? Actually, there is. But sadly, most small business owners don’t really know what it is.
Web Design is about one thing – making your website appealing and attractive to your target market.
Web Development, on the other hand, is about making your website functional and helping your visitors find more easily the information they are looking for. There are a variety of strategies for accomplishing that task.
While web design is concerned about elements such as logo design, sidebar widths, header and footer appearance and photo/video presentations, web development is more concerned with elements such as navigation menu protocols, conversion funnels and usability studies. Of course, copywriting and SEO are also very important.
I won’t say that one is more important than the other, but it does help to know the difference. Your web development team should include a good web designer. But it shouldn’t consist only of a web designer. At any rate, if you are setting up a website that you hope will make you money then you should think about web design within the framework of your web development strategy – not the other way around.
API stands for Application Programming Interface. It’s a developer tool that allows website developers to make websites that interact with other sites in special ways. Many of the top websites online allow website developers to use APIs to give their websites special characteristics and features. Some of the sites that use APIs are:
- Google
- Yahoo
- Bing
- Facebook
- Twitter
- Digg
- Delicious
- eBay
- Feedburner
- Flickr
- YouTube
And that’s a small list. There are thousands of other websites online that offer APIs to developers for use on their websites.
There are two ways that you can use an API for your website design and development. The first way is to take an API from a company with features that you’d like to add to your website and incorporate those features into your site using the API. For instance, you can take the Twitter API and create a feature on your site to allow content to automatically post on Twitter when you create it, or to allow your site visitors to comment on your site and automatically post their comments to Twitter.
Another way to use APIs is to create one for your site so that others who want to add unique features of the site you designed can incorporate those into their sites. This benefits you because other website owners will be sending you traffic from their websites.
When it comes to web design, you are no longer relegated to a simple HTML site with no interactivity. APIs can make your site more Web 2.0 and interactive.
