The Differences Between Web Designers and Web Developers
I’m sure many of you guys who are Web Designers or Web Developers have faced clients who are not only clueless about what they want, but also clueless as to what the roles and differences are between these two terms. I dare not say most, but quite a number of clients (especially those that comes from marketing, no offence intended) have no clue about our roles.
Pardon me if the way I see things are not the same as you guys, but I am compelled to clarify, and educate people on what my opinions are regarding the roles of web designers and web developers. In summary here’s what the differences are:
Web Developers
Web developers are the rockstar, or the champion that makes most of the website’s magic works. In short, if you want the website to be able to take user registration, collect some data, and produce certain results or outputs that correlate to the visitors, these are the people you are looking for.
Web developers will listen to your needs, suggest some approach to solve your problem, and make the magic work with their awesome programming skills.
Web Designers
Web designers, on the other hand, are the people who make your website look beautiful and also usable. They face challenges on plethora of issues related to different browsers people use to view your website, think about the most efficient way to layout your website so that the website loads as fast as it could, and make your visitors want to know more about you and your services.
In other words, web designers are the one that decorates the stage, print the tickets, and put up banners to the rockstar concert that will be performed by the rockstar themselves – the web developers (see above).
So?
What we want you to understand is that both web designers and web developers work hand-in-hand with each other to produce the website that not only solve your problems (and make it do what you want), but solve it elegantly and beautifully, while keeping the fun of your visitors intact so that they will come back for more.
Let’s take an example of a canned drink. Web developers will be the one figuring what is the best way to manufacture the drink you wanted, they will figure out what are the mixtures, and what kind of factory setup is ideal to produce the drinks efficiently. Web designers, on the other hand, will figure out how to make the can and boxes looks appealing to the customers so they will buy the drink and tell their friends about it.
A note to both web designers and developers
Now this part is going to be a bit geeky. As a web designer, it will be a tremendous advantage if you could pick up some web development languages – most popular at the moment is PHP, ASP and Ruby on Rails. By knowing the basics of these web development languages, you can integrate your designs into the application in a speedier manner, without confusing the web developers on how your HTML, CSS and JavaScript works, and at the same time saves the agony of the developers accidentally breaking your hours of work by missing one tag (or a semicolon, for that matter).
For developers, knowledge in laying out your basic application interface in a properly coded (and unstyled) manner will also save the designer’s time by not having to restructure the web page to make it work with how he designed the page.
Conclusion
For all, remember this – everytime you want to start a new web site, think about it – will it have anything that is using database? If you do, chances are you will need to hire both web designers and web developers to get the best results.
If you just want to make your website look prettier (the so-called facelift) and preserving the current function on what the site does, then you will need to hire web designers.
Some designers can also develop. Many web development teams nowadays will include a few designers on board, so they come in a package. Though they’re hard to come by, as many designers are not willing to be tied up in one team, unless they’re working on a whole new innovative ideas.
What should you do? If you think your web site will need some development work, contact the developers – they will contact the designers to help them with the cosmetics.
Savvy?
Thanks for clarifying the difference between them! I often come across people asking about what job I do, and telling them that I do “web design” still needs a lot of explaining, argh!
Hopefully people will grasp better how the web works. ;)
now most developer and designer try to master in both, so he is designer and also developer.
basically designer play with html and css meanwhile developer play with php, and java etc, am i right? :D
Almost. But there will be some inter-twined parts of both web designers and web developers. This overlapping part is the key to both sides working together efficiently.
Banzai! I have a hard time explaining the difference between the two. After I show them the sites that I designed, I explain that its coded by someone else.
Suddenly their expression changed. Guh.