Web Development
A question I get asked very often is 'how easy is it to build a website'. Well, any computer literate person could learn to put together a very simple, static webpage but this would not necessarily look professional and may never be found by potential visitors. This is because there is a lot more to having a successful web presence, particularly for business, than simply throwing together a HTML site and uploading it to a web server.
A successful, professional website should take into consideration Design, Search Engine Optimisation, Accessibility, not to mention a plethora of technologies to consider.
Also, people tend to think Web Development and Web Design are the same thing... they're not. So, what is the difference?
Wikipedia defines these quite simply:
Web development is a broad term for any activities related to developing a web site for the World Wide Web or an intranet. This can include e-commerce business development, web design, web content development, client-side/server-side coding, and web server configuration. However, among web professionals, "web development" usually refers only to the non-design aspects of building web sites, e.g. writing markup and coding. Web development can range from developing the simplest static single page of plain text to the most complex web-based internet applications, electronic businesses, or social network services.
Web design is a process of conceptualization, planning, modeling, and execution of electronic media delivery via Internet in the form of Markup language suitable for interpretation by Web browser and display as Graphical user interface (GUI).
The intent of web design is to create a web site -- a collection of electronic files that reside on a web server/servers and present content and interactive features/interfaces to the end user in form of Web pages once requested. Such elements as text, bit-mapped images (GIFs, JPEGs, PNGs), forms can be placed on the page using HTML/XHTML/XML tags. Displaying more complex media (vector graphics, animations, videos, sounds) requires plug-ins such as Flash, QuickTime, Java run-time environment, etc. Plug-ins are also embedded into web page by using HTML/XHTML tags.