Web Designers and Web Developers are two very different animals altogether. Web Designers draw pictures all day then go home to enjoy their evenings with friends and family, go to the cinema, sports clubs, pubs, or watch a movie at home with their nearest and dearest whilst tucking in to a fantastic take-away. Web Developers (or Programmers as they were called in the good old days) on the other hand write code all day, then go home and write more code until they collapse on the keyboard. Night after night after night. Yes, this article is written by a Developer. Don’t get me wrong, one is no more important than the other when it comes to producing your website, it’s just that one puts in ten times more effort than the other!
So what’s the difference? Well for a start, Web Developers are rubbish at designing websites, and Web Designers are rubbish at making websites actually work. Developers have no artistic creativity at all, and absolutely no idea which colour goes with what. Pantones what? CMYK what? Forget it. Developers cannot even match their handbags to their shoes. They can cut graphics up which they’ve been given and optimise them for the web but that’s as far as it goes. Secondly, Web Developers cannot incorporate your beautiful web design into any kind of printed literature. The Designers are the ones who look after your corporate identity right across the breadth of your marketing activities, and they talk to printers in language they can understand. Developers cannot do that (and don’t want to do that).
So it pains me to say it, but Developers need Designers to keep feeding them beautiful designs because they are simply not genetically equipped to do it themselves.
However, these pictures of websites they produce, these designs, will remain pictures until the Web Developer gets his/her hands on it and brings it to life on the internet. Yes, it’s the developer who actually makes it work. And it’s the Developer who spends ten times longer getting it to work than the Designer did drawing it!
Unless the Designer is very familiar with web work, the Developer can be presented with impossible tasks. Designing for print is a far cry from designing for the web because the web design is something that is functional, it has navigation requirements, sometimes complex ones, and the design has to take this into account. In fact website navigation is a key aspect of the design, and if it’s not right the Developer will pass it back to the Designer who then has to go back to the client.
The Designer also needs a good understanding of what is technically possible so they can design their widgets with confidence. And if you’re VERY lucky, you’ll come across a designer who also has an understanding of what works well for the search engines. So I’ll admit, designers do need SOME technical understanding, much like they need some technical understanding of the print process.
But let’s not get carried away here, Web Designers still draw pictures all day and Web Developers still write code all day and all night.
So, the Designer is the one who is responsible for putting your corporate image across on the web and giving your website that ‘wow factor’; the one thing that will create a good first impression (because as we all know, you only get one chance to create a good first impression). But the poor Developer is the one in the back room cutting the design up and coding it up so that it works not only efficiently, but just as the Designer (and the customer) had envisaged.
Steve Ballmer again shows off his professionalism with this display at the MIX 2008 conference. Now it’s all about the web developers baby. You’re scaring us Steve. . .