The phrases "web design" and "web development" have been used interchangeably, but there are differences in terms of the way they are structured and built. The aim of this article is to ensure the differences are made clear.

The reason why most people use it interchangeably stems from the fact that they all have similar technologies they use in building them. For example, all websites whether web design or web development will have HTML/XHTML at its core, include some JavaScript and CSS. And a web designer and developer may both know these technologies.

So the big questions is how web development fundamentally different from web design? 

I will put two definitions I found on the web:

Web design " is the customer-facing part of the website. A web designer is concerned with how a site looks and how the customers interact with it." In other words, web design focuses on the look and feel of the website including the way the colors of the text, and the graphics blend with the overall theme of the website. And remember that the content on such websites are static, which means, in order to edit content you will have to go into the hard code to make changes.

Web development on the other hand, requires a back-end, also known as a database, which stores the content of the website and displays them dynamically. This usually requires programming knowledge and skills. A web developer focuses on how a site works and how the customers get things done on it.

So before you start confusing your client please make these clear to him or her.

So from the above description, one could tell that the fundamental difference is that wed design is static while website development is dynamic.

This fundamental difference will in turn impact on the decision process on which kind of hosting you would require. A static website will just need a web server on which to upload the image files and HTML files, but a dynamic website will require complex hosting set ups including an application server to host the programmed code, a database server to store data and a web server to save HMTL files.

Currently, the use of the WordPress platform is becoming widespread. The reason behind this is because of the time factor. A web developer can set up a website in a few hours to about a few days depending on the nature of the project.