So any professional website, and especially the one designed for eCommerce purposes, requires design and development. Design is what a visitor sees on website’s pages, while development is the functionality that the website offers to visitors. Therefore at least two groups of specialists are engaged in the web site building process and they are web designers and web developers.
A remarkable visual design, keyword saturated content and user-friendly functionality are a must for a website intended to withstand tough competition. In fact, it is recommended to have another specialists engaged into the web design and development process such as a copywriter to write a good content for the website, a search engine optimizer to make certain actions to improve the website's ranking in search engines and others. However, in this article I would like to focus mostly on work of web designers and web developers.
What Does a Web Designer Take Care of?
A web designer is similar to (if not the same as) a graphic designer and his/her job comprehends creating “look and feel” of a website. Web designers work mostly with graphics and their usual tools of trade are graphic editing software like Adobe Photoshop and/or Illustrator. This is a web designer who is the first to decide on how the layout and color scheme of a website will look like (or at least implements the client’s ideas regarding the website appearance). Web designers are in fact graphic designers and artists who should be able to feel which colors and fonts would fit best the website to be created and which colors will match each other in a pleasant looking color scheme of the site. They mix and mach various colors of almost each graphic element of the site in order to create an aesthetic design which at the same time will meet client’s requirements and correspond to the image and branding of the company for which the website is being built. That is why it is important to have a good artistic taste and esthetic feeling for colors and elements positioning on a web page to be a good web designer. It is also advisable for web designers to have knowledge of HTML (HyperText Markup Language) and CSS (Cascading Style Sheet) which are today’s basic encoding languages used to “explain” to a web browser how a web page must be laid out on screen and which colors the page elements are supposed to be.
When a graphic mock-up is created, it’s time to code it into a format compatible with web browsers and make the size of web pages as small as possible in order to load pages quickly. It can be done either by web designers, if they have enough knowledge in HTML and CSS, or by web developers.
What Are Web Developers Needed for?
When visual design and layout are finished and approved by the client, the work is handed over to a web developer or a team of web developers which are responsible for functionality and usability. Functionality comprehends interactivity that the website offers to a visitor including animated elements. Web developers work with various scripting and programming languages such as PHP, JavaScrip, Perl and others to create programs (scripts) that will ensure functioning of so called dynamic pages. Web developers deal with the “front end” (user side) and the “back end” (server side) of a website. Working with the front end, they employ abilities of JavaScript to create some cool effects on text and images (like swapping images when a mouse moves over the image) and Flash to animate some graphics etc. The back end applications require creating of databases to add dynamic and interactive features to web pages, and this is when PHP is commonly used. Web developers create various pieces of code which in fact are programs telling a browser what must happen if a user makes a certain action on a web page. Those chunks of code are to be integrated into HTML code which is in fact the skeleton of any web site.
The other important thing a web developer is responsible for is the website usability testing. Web designers must make sure that any user will have no problems while visiting a website. Therefore a web developer verifies whether the website looks properly in various web browsers and different screen resolutions, whether the pages load quickly, navigation is user-friendly and all links lead where they are supposed to. They also test work of all applications available on the site.
It is rare that a single individual perfectly knows all things necessary to build a completely functional website from scratch. That is the reason why most of really professional and complicated websites are created in synergy of skills of experienced web designers and developers.
Oftentimes usability test reveals some problems which can be fixed only in close cooperation between web designers and web developers as web design and development has a lot of overlaps. That’s why it is reasonable to have web designers and developers working “shoulder to shoulder” as this will save your time and money.
Our web design and development studio employs the whole range of professionals necessary to create websites of any complexity from scratch. Our web design and development process based on many years experience is organized in such a way to allow us to deliver high quality websites within the shortest possible time period (which depends on the project complexity). Please, feel free to turn to us with any question or inquiry concerning your web design and development project.
