It is like a roller coaster ride while differentiating between web design and graphic design to people with a very little knowledge of this both. While building a web site you need to recognize the distinct difference between the graphic design and web design.
Designer Centric web designing
Many times graphic designing and web designing is taken as the same. And this type of thinking is mostly prevalent with the firms transitioning from the graphic designing and multimedia designing into the web designing. They consider that graphic designing and web designing are like sibling from the same family as the brother and sister. But as accordingly they are analogous to second cousins. There are a few similarities between them but they have significantly more differences between them both. It becomes very challenging to get old school graphic designers to separate from their roots.
Graphic designing can be considered as the analogous to special effects in a movie. It can make the visuals very amazing. But if you are not having a good story and dialogues it will not be of any worth how ever stunning the special effects are. High quality pictures and multimedia can never trump the high quality content.
Rise and fall of Flash
The rise and fall of the Flash was evidenced a few years ago. People wanted to take all the advantages of the usage of Flash in their websites. But that trend quickly died out. After experiencing this, the website owners quickly realized that Flash is not the best and ideal method for delivering content. Only a very few sites are able to deliver high quality content utilizing Flash in there website making. As a fact Flash has become the best and excellent delivery method for videos on web.
The fall of Flash was evidenced a few years ago. People wanted to use all the advantages of the flash in their respective websites at that time. But the trend quickly died. It was realized by the website owners that Flash is not the best and most ideal method for delivering content. There are very few websites that are able to display high quality content utilizing Flash. For web video also Flash has become an excellent delivery method.
Battle that goes on
When creating a website the designing firms are usually enduring a significant idea storm. Artists will usually look at the designing thing differently from the way the developers do look at. You get even more different options when you try adding the management into the mix. All of this ideas and opinions should be in the balance with the things that are best for the client and the users.
Simple Example
For an example take Google and yahoo, they together daily account for an approximately 150 Million searches. People go to these sites not for their prowess graphic design but they go because the sites are very easy to use and they allow access to an unbelievable amount of content.