web developer vs web designer
Web Developer vs Web Designer
Fridge vs Avocado Green, Stainless Steel, White…
Running Car vs Paint Colour, Shape window tints….
3 bedroom home plans vs spacial environment and finishes inside and out
Having worked in the construction industry for years before taking the design career by the horns has helped a lot in web design. A single building is drawn by an architect, many engineers and a designer. The architectural drawings describe how it’s built, the engineering describes what size pipes, wiring, supporting walls etc. And the design drawing give the finishes. They almost always all work together at some point in the planning process.
Creating a web site can be just as complicated as house construction.
The web developer is like the architect. If there is no final wire frame (plan) in mind then that becomes part of the solution. The developer must create a website that allows for the design to be altered by the user.
The web designer brands, colours and re-shapes the functioning website.
If you hire a designer to develop your site, hopefully they will contract out the hard coding parts and not attempt to do it themsleves.
If you hire a developer to design and brand your site, hope fully the same will apply as above.
Very rarely do both co-exist in one person with any degree of success. It’s a simple fact of left brain right brain thinking.
No where in this post is SEO mentioned. That’s because SEO not just part of website construction alone and has nothing to do with branding and design. If SEO is important to the website owner (and who wouldn’t), it get’s built in as part of the development. It is then taught to the owner on how to use it, what content to write and where to put it. If SEO is the most important thing on your website list, don’t ask for it last.
This is a good description, and good advice.
Not only is it unrealistic to expect a typical designer to be a good programmer, it’s usually not a good idea even if you happen to find the rare individual with a grasp of both. (I know both areas well; for me, learning design, printing and programming has been a 25-year process!) Why’s this?
Because any website with any significant complexity has many, many pieces. It’s much more efficient to split up the load in a team and let people specialize their thinking / working processes, they can work smoothly and with fewer ‘context switches’: the process of mentally changing gears to cope with a greatly different task.
In a one-person show, all of the context switches happen to the same individual; they are alone in a project, which is isolating and demoralizing no matter how cool the project; and they have a whole lot of work to do without the prospect of relief. These factors are additive and the net drag is enough to stall many projects.
The solution: have one or more developers, and one or more designers. No less.