A web designer, who often also works in graphic design, is responsible for a website’s layout, functionality, and aesthetics. A web developer creates and updates a site’s underlying infrastructure. An effective web designer has to have a wide range of technical, visual, and creative abilities. To implement the website’s design, a web developer writes code in languages like HTML, JavaScript, PHP, and Python.
What Exactly is Web Design?
The front end and internal functionality of a website are both factors in web design. Your brand should inspire certain emotions in the end user based on how a website seems, feels, and provides the required user experience. It covers a variety of topics, including the color palette of a website, embedded media like photographs and videos, and shapes.
A web designer’s responsibility is to highlight the service and successfully communicate the brand message on the business’ website. They are in charge of employing graphics, colors, and pictures to provide the best possible user experience and SEO. Moreover, web designers must ensure that users can sense the brand personality on the page.
The fact that not all site designers are also copywriters, video editors, or photographers should not be overlooked. You may need to contract out the appropriate tasks for writing material and producing the media assets utilized on your website. Therefore, when ordering outsource web design services, discuss responsibilities and functions.
What Exactly is Web Development?
Web development is responsible for overseeing the coding that runs websites. One such breakdown is into front- and back-end teams. The code that determines how a website will show the designs that a designer has mocked up is called the front-end or client-side of an application. Controlling the data in the database and transferring it to the front end for display is the responsibility of an application’s back end, often known as the server side. As you may have guessed, there is a lot of crossovers between a web designer’s job and a front-end developer’s job.
Significant Distinctions Between Web Designers And Web Developers
The Majority Of Site Designers Don’t Code
The overall appearance and feel of a website are the responsibility of web designers. They could use a visual editor like Photoshop to create images, or they might use an app prototyping and animation tool to create layouts and high-fidelity prototypes. Yet, none of these primary duties call for programming.
Web designers may use their visual skills to develop your website without knowing how to code thanks to the rise of content management systems (CMS) and no-code website builders. This extends well beyond the scope of their typical work as designers.
Web Designers Don’t Produce Assets
Web developers are computer programmers who possess the coding skills necessary to expand a website’s functionality. The developer takes the designer’s wireframes and mockups and turns them into HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Visual assets are things like images that serve as button backgrounds, color schemes, and fonts that web developers often don’t have to create themselves. It takes just a few lines of code to get them fully functional on the website.
Web Developers Cost More Than Web Designers
It is sometimes more costly to hire a web developer than a web designer. According to ZipRecruiter, the average hourly wage for web engineers is $36 and for web designers, it is $29 per hour. Supply and demand are probably the major reasons for this mismatch; there are more designers than developers, and coding as a whole is highly in-demand expertise. When coding becomes more widespread, the wage gap between those who can and those who cannot will naturally close. While hiring, you are not only paying for a person’s skills but also for their experience.
Conclusion
There are several distinctions between web designers and web developers. A web designer creates the wireframe for the website, choosing the layout and color schemes, and assuring the best possible UX/UI. A web developer oversees the back-end system development and coding for your website, bringing the wireframe to life.
Coding expertise is necessary for web developers but not for web designers. Web designers are often more imaginative and focus on a website’s aesthetics. The processes that keep a website operational are of particular interest to web developers, who are often more technically inclined.
Web developers utilize technical tools like GitHub, WordPress, and NumPy, while web designers use creative tools. There are also hybrid web developers and designers who are capable of doing both programming and designer tasks.
