What's the difference between web design and web development?
Here's how we see it...
Graphic Designers: Professionals with a talent for graphics and all things visual. An image that a good graphic designer has put together is visually appealing, stimulating and makes you say "wow". It can be an element of web design or totally separate and used to design logos, leaflets, posters and other marketing material. Not all graphic designers can design and build (develop) websites.
Web Designers: Design how the site will look, creates a site layout, choose colours, graphics and branding as appropriate. It is still highly visual and has its origins in graphic design. Many web designers also put the site together, which I refer to as web development.
Web Development: A good web developer can take the images a graphic designer has produced and the layout the web designer has come up with and turns it into a fully functioning, professional web site. Web developers are specialists at developing websites, but not all of them are any good at designing them! Web developers are code monkeys, geeks, html junkies, nerds etc etc and use a variety of programming technologies and languages in their work.
For reference, the Wikipedia definition of Web Development says it much more eloquently than we have!
Real Life Example: We recently took on a project in which the site had already been designed. It was a visually fabulous site, but it was designed by a graphic designer. The text was turned into images which is bad news from an accessibility and search engine point of view and goes against best practices for websites.
Aunty B's developed the website by using the designers work as a template. We recreated all the text and the layout in web pages. The result was a site that search engines and screen readers could read, making it far more accessible and search engine friendly, but without losing the look and feel of the original design.