What Are The Differences Between Website Developers Vs Website Designers?

These are two great professions often interchanged by users in terms of both meanings and concepts. There is a distinct variation between them as both refer to the different dimensions of web development processes involving two great skills. However, there is also a mutual and interdependent relationship between a web developer and a web designer.

Let us examine the differences between these professionals and the factors that differentiated them from each other.

The web developer

A web developer is a professional that builds a website using programming tools like HTML, JavaScript, JQuery, and CSS. They construct the skeletal system of a website using tools peculiar to the system. Web developers are analytical, technical, sequential, and logical. It is a career generally involved in creating a website from the basics. A developer is regarded as left brained and highly talented to be able to fashion the skeletal framework on which a designer works upon. In order to excel in your career as a web developer, you need a basic education at least a Bachelor’s degree in any field is good but a degree in computer and web programming is better.

Furthermore, as a web developer, you need to acquire some technical skills in order to perform your duties effectively and efficiently. Therefore, you need to have some skills in Hypertext Preprocessor (PHP), jQuery, HTML, JavaScript, and Java.  There are more job opportunities for you as a web developer who knows the job processes and can package a website skillfully.

The skills you required to succeed as a website developer are:

Analytical skills

One of the prerequisite skills for you to succeed and excel as a web developer is the analytical skills. You need to be critical, systematic, and methodical. This skill will help you to be able to examine and survey the procedures and approaches to apply when setting up a website. You need to understand the right tools to use in order to have a high quality website output.

Logical skills

You need to be highly sensible, reasonable, and commonsensical in order to achieve your goals as a developer. This skill will help you to know how to use the correct computer programs and codes to create a good web layout and outline for a designer to work upon.

Sequential skills

As a developer, you will have the attitude of being proactive and doing things serially and chronologically, in order to fulfill a project. This entails being orderly in your approach to developing a website first things must come first. You should know how to begin and conclude a project without wasting much time and understand what the customer wants in order to know the software and programs to use in preparing the website. Furthermore, a skilled web builder must lay his web foundation very well with good codes and understandable programming language that will be easy for a designer to access and resurface with his own artistic and aesthetic skills.

Technical skills

This skill is like a builder who builds a house with bricks, cement, water, wood, and roofing sheets. Then an interior designer will come to choose the paints, carpets, and furniture that will match the building and use them to decorate inside and outside of the structure. As a skilled website developer, you need to know how to use the different tools and programming language like HTML, JavaScript, Hypertext Processor (PHP), Css, etc. to create a distinctive website platform and web applications that can enable a designer to polish and decorate with his graphic design accessories. The developer should be able to use programming languages and set up the database structure, e-mail services, user authentication, and other practical aspects of the website. He will also prepare the data on the website by creating codes and technical information using software like version control, text editors, and command line interface.

Web development as a career

Do you want to choose web development as a career?

Web development is a career that will transform your financial status if you train yourself to become the right candidate and expert needed for the job. The salary structure varies according to experience, skills, and location. There are different salary structures for various skills in every industry. However, the annual pay for web developers ranges between $40,000 and $100, 000.

The web development career has great potentials and opportunities if you can organize and arrange your portfolio very well. Your work experience and past performances will add up to boost your credential, profile, and online visibility. Therefore, you need to show case your expertise and skills for prospective employers to view. You can make use of GitHub.com and display your great web building skills and profile. There are other sites like the Heroku.com and Amazon (AWS) that use cloud based web-hosting services to feature web programs and applications created and constructed by great developers. Furthermore, there are more job openings and opportunities for the web designer than the web developer. This is because the web designer controls the internal processes like the graphic design, web analytics and the flow of data and information in a website.

The web Designer

The role of a web designer is similar to the work of an interior designer in a house. When the builders have completed the task of laying the foundation of a house and constructed all the facilities within, the interior decorator comes to choose the color of paints, carpets, and furniture that will fit the house. This is exactly what the web designer does for a website. He comes in after the web developer has completed the task of creating and building the website and then he will choose the graphics and graphic design programs that will fit the site.

The web designer is a professional that applies graphic design software like Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop, and InDesign coupled with good codes to make the website vivid and lively. This is a creative and an imaginative skill possessed by people that are regarded as right brained and attracted to the arts and design.  If you want to be a top rated designer, you need to have a mastery of the relationship between color, typography, the audience and user’s background. These qualities will boost your portfolio and enhance your visibility when prospective employers are hunting for a professional web designer like you.

Some of the skills you need to succeed as a website designer are:

Artistic skills

You need to have an innovative, resourceful, and inventive attitude in order to succeed as a website designer. This will help you invent designs and create patterns that will be unique for the website and your target audience. Remember, you need to choose your colors very aesthetically and attractively.

Creative skills

As a web designer, you need to be original, productive, and inventive with the graphics of the web. Your creativity will enhance the web outlook and layout.

Holistic skills

If you have this skill, it will be able to prompt you to do your creative designs thoroughly and completely leaving no stones unturned. You should have a mindset of perfection towards your web designing projects.

Imaginative skills

Your imaginative skill is the ability to create a picture of the website layout and outlook within your mind. You can be able to see the pattern of the website you want to create already and then transfer it into reality with your graphic design programs.

Technical skills needed by a web designer

Some of the technical skills needed by a website designer include JavaScript, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Acrobat, jQuery, and Adobe Dreamweaver. Web designers are not pragmatically, responsible for coding a website; their duty is to make sure the site is user-friendly, appealing and pleasant to the eyes, and aesthetically beautiful. They apply graphic design software and programs like Adobe Photoshop, Gimp, Inkscape – which is a much better alternative and an option to Photoshop, and Illustrator. Website designers are responsible for the administration of the flow of data and information in a website. They could also be responsible for website analytics.

Web design as a career

Are you a professional web designer?
Web design just like all other professions has the potentials to empower you financially. You will see the enormous financial opportunities in the job if you can determine to play your role very well. The financial earning of a good web designer is estimated to be $30,000 to $ 80,000 per annum. However, this estimation varies according to the location, portfolio, skills, and online visibility of the web designer.  You will need to increase your online visibility by posting your credentials and work portfolio on some websites like Behance.com and Dribble.com. These organizations use their websites to project website designers’ creativity and resourcefulness in attractive formats and colorful schemes. You can also display your work portfolio on your personal website, therefore, create a website where you can show case your skills and control how the information and data is presented without intrusion and interference from another website.  However, also make use of the other third party websites they can help to project you to potential employers.

However, in terms of job openings and opportunities, a website designer has much better chances of getting jobs and employment than a website developer.

Some factors that created the differences between website developers and website designers are:

1. Using illogical, unfamiliar and unclear codes, and symbols in the programming of the software in a website. The website developer uses codes that are unfamiliar to the website designer to build the website making it difficult for him to access the site easily without his assistance and training.
2. Most of the times there are no samples or sketches of how codes and graphics are presented on the websites making it difficult for the website developer or website designer to access the sites without undergoing a formal training by either party. Therefore, samples and sketches of how codes or graphics should appear on the websites should be provided to enhance easy access. Let the users see these codes and samples in blue and white colors, and learn how to use them practically. Do not just tell them about the usage verbally.
3. A partisan spirit and a parochial attitude towards each other initiated the difference. They need to be teachable and willing to learn from each other and improve on their skills in the web development business. The web developers should be able to accept user experience ideas about web development processes and features from designers in order to create a better and more feasible website, while the web designers should receive design concepts and strategies from developers and boost their performance and effectiveness on the websites.
4. The unwillingness of web developers to learn the other feature of web development process and apply it to work has created many discrepancies in their operations. More so, website designers are not keen about the processes of website creation and development making it difficult for them to adapt and progress in the field.
5. There is no zeal and effort to study and read materials and documents relating to the other part of website creation processes and strategies, which they do not know and understand, this has made it difficult for them to utilize website packages and programs to maximize their profits effectively.
6. They do not ask questions concerning codes, software, and programs they do not understand on the website. You ask questions to know but when you refuse to ask, the answer will be hidden from you. That is the logic behind asking questions in any matter.

These are the reasons that initiated and enhanced the differences created, making the two roles to vary from each other. It is a wide gap that could be bridged if need be in order to maximize the online experiences, performances, and profits of both parties. However, it could be seen from these points made above that the two skills and professions are distinctly different and have diverse features from each other.

 

Conclusion

The web developers are professionals that build and create the skeletal structure and backbone of a website.  Website developers speak a different language or more than one, than website designers do. They use codes to bring live into the website, therefore without coders the plans will never actualize. They work with designers to make semantic mark-up languages like XHTML and CSS. Then they convert static PSDs to interactive working web and browser pages. In addition, programmers are artistic and oriented in software languages like PHP, ASP, Ruby on Walls, Python, HTML, CSS, and much more according to the skill they specialize and the level of their experience. The web development career and skill is highly demanded therefore, any programmer or coder with a good portfolio and experience will surely get quality and high paying jobs. Web designers are architects of the web that focus on the look and feel of the website. They are regarded as visual art experts that specialize in color scheming, graphic design, and data or information flow. Most of the times, they make use of their right-brain hemisphere as much in show casing their imaginative skills, intuitive capabilities, and creative potentials in their designs to create a wonderful user experience. The essential skills of a website designer that will boost his portfolio are good knowledge of Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, and Dreamweaver.  While web developers are the main builders. The educational requirement for both professions is a university degree.

Therefore, let us consider a brief summary of the activities and duties of a web developer and a web designer.

A web developer creates, builds and develops the inner workings of a website. He is skilled, competent, and a professional in programming languages like PHP, .NET, Python, C, and Ruby. He makes sure the code is clean, maintainable, user-friendly, and responsive. The web developer schemes and fashions the user interface and is considered to be left-brained that means, he is logical, thinks linearly, and functions more technically. He is always ready and willing to give you a coding experience either you recommend your own products or he uses github. He is on an average salary of $ 50,000 per annum.

A web designer uses HTML, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), and JavaScript. He also focuses on the look and feel of a website and is competent in color scheming, graphic design, and information flow. He can also create a great and grand user experience for you.  He is right-brained and has a strong intuitive capability, creative skills, and imaginative potentials. His profession is preferred more than a degree while his average salary is $40,000 per annum.

Furthermore, having made all these narrations and surveys about the different roles and professional requirements of web developers and web designers, which of these roles will you choose as a profession considering the benefits and headaches associated with each job profile. However, the taste of the pudding is in the eating. You cannot make a meaningful choice now until you are in the field. Get your hands on deck to know the career that will work for you, either one or both. It is possible.