I was searching about the differences of Web Design and Web Development this days, and I found out that a common sense is that Web Design is planning a website or app and Web Development is actually writing the code that will make it real.
And then I realized that the first certificate in fCC’s curriculum is called “Responsive Web Design”, when we actually do basic Front-end Responsive Web Development.
Is the certificate’s title really incorrect?
Hey Isaac,
great question!
I think language and terms are dynamic,
meaning both change all the time.
Back in the days, web design was mostly HTML and CSS: adding content and make it look nice.
The term “web design” is normally used to describe the design process relating to the front-end (client side) design of a website including writing markup. Web design partially overlaps web engineeringin the broader scope of web development.
Nowadays, by adding all the interactivate with JavaScript and its growing eco system, I think it becomes more and more technical and engineering-ish, so we add Development to it, to describe this bigger thing.
Responsive Web Design is a “fixed term” (don’t know what the correct English term is), so although the meaning of Web Design changed, the whole term is pretty useful.
Hello Miku,
Thanks for the answer.
Indeed people blur the lines between the two terms, but freeCodeCamp shouldn’t.
I’m convinced that the certificate’s name should be “Responsive Front-end Web Development”.
Today writing HTML and CSS is doing front-end development. At least this is a common sense I have seen in my researches.
A front-end developer takes the visual design of a website (whether they created that design or it was handed to them by a visual designer) and builds it in code. A front-end developer uses HTML for the structure of the site, CSS to dictate the visual styles and layout, and perhaps even some Javascript.
In the early days of the web, the answer to that question was simple: designers design and developers code. Today that question requires a little more nuance–you’d be hard pressed to find a web designer who didn’t know at least a little HTML and CSS, and you won’t have to look far for a front-end web developer who can whip up a storyboard.
Source - Upwork
In this article from Upwork they make it very clear that dealing with HTML and CSS is part of Web Development.
If I learned how to do Responsive Front-end Web Development, I don’t want to show people a “Responsive Web Design” certificate…