If you use the Internet on a regular basis you have probably noticed the wide variance of website design; some are your plain vanilla type websites; white backgrounds with black text and very few if any graphics while others are distinguished by their heavy reliance on graphics such as flash animation.

Website Design

Website design is generally viewed as an aspect of web development. You will find individuals who are web designers, those who are web developers along with those who claim to do both. But even though both of these terms are used loosely to mean the same thing, there is a difference between website design and web development; in short website design takes care of the look and web site development makes the little work with the search engines and Internet technology.

Although flash animation websites are extremely popular these website designs are notoriously subject to be bypassed by search engine spiders because they cannot read imagery. Regardless of how much text is within the flash animation it will not be able to be read by the search engine spiders. Because of this limitation, without web development there are many sites which never appear on the search engines. The website designs that use flash animations that are listed in the search engines have gone through the process of website development.

When you understand the limitations of using flash animation or other graphics you can develop workarounds that are content-based to balance the impact of the graphics. Website design can be as unique and creative as necessary to reflect the business image and produce a visitor friendly experience at the same time.

Web Development

At its best website development will provide the best exposure and visibility to be indexed by any search engine and visible on all different types of browsers. This one factor alone can make or break your level of success with an online business. If your website design is not a browser independent web development services can correct this problem.

Although the graphical elements of website design include the navigation bar, the navigation process; how a visitor travels through your site is accomplished through a variety of development methods. For instance internal page hyper links, breadcrumb links, site maps and the search function all play a role in navigating through a website.

The way the content of the website design is managed is also a part of web development; the use of HTML tables as part of the website design process is much more of a fluke than most people realize; HTML tables were never intended for the purpose of bringing continuity to website design, this is the purpose of using cascading style sheets or CSS, to bring continuity of style and design to the website in an easy to edit format. The problem with using HTML tables from a search engine spider's point of view is the additional lines of coding they are required to read when tables are used to design a website.

Because there are millions of websites indexed on a monthly basis search companies program the spiders with a certain amount of time to crawl a page, read the code and index it. What does that mean for your website if you use tables? Very often what it means is that the spider does not complete reading a page or only visits a limited number of the total pages in your website. Whether or not a website designer uses W3C compliant techniques such as cascading style sheets is one of the most factors to consider when creating your Internet website.

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