Web design in simple words means if you want to build a house then your architect makes a layout or plan of your house first. That layout places Bedrooms Halls Kitchen(s) W Doors Windows etc. Also it mentions where is your house from all other surrounding properties etc. Then going further you may select a color scheme for your rooms or for outside. Website design is also same . A website designer will create a Plan of your site like Home Page Product Services About Us Contact Us and other pages per your need. Then he will take one page at a time and will place the Page Building blocks as below which is called Layout Header - (needs to placed on right side of page or left or top) Side Bar ( if at all you want it on site) The information on the distance between these elements may be given or web developer has to infer it from it. Similarly web designer will design other pages as well. Web designer has toe up with Typography which is nothing but what font family will be used for H1 H2 H3 H4 H5 H6 Body Text etc. This includes if it is normal or italics. Also main thing would be colorbination of your website otherwise website will be horrible and ugly. So color of Logo Images used on site Menu color Image colors Body and overall content on website should match to each other. So web designer will provide you with color pallet and most probably PSD PNG PDF Sketch (Mac) files which Web Developer can slice using Photoshop or Sketch etc. and use it for further development. So once a formal layout is ready then Web Designer uses HTML tags CSS Colors to make the layout as designed. This is called Front End Development or Web Design. The output of this process will be HTML files CSS files may be PHP files etc. Once all of this is ready then a Web Developer takes over and develops website using all of above. I hope this helps.