Web Designer or Developer, Which Should You Use?
What are Web Designers and Developers for?
A website is the assemblage of similar web pages specified under a common domain name and publicised on at least one web server.
This process of creating a website is called “Website Creation.”
Web design and Web development come into consideration when we address the topic “Website Creation,” a person who designs a website is known as a web designer.
In contrast, a person who develops the site is called a web developer.
Web Developers or Web Designers exploit a vital role in many businesses’ website builds. Nevertheless, for a person in search of either, you must understand the differences between them as you seek to find a suitable individual to play the role of designing or development in your company’s website build, something we all know too well at our Web Design Surrey UK agency
Attention web designers you have 50 milliseconds to make a good first impression!
Creating a website is a very daunting task, especially when it comes to finding the right personnel to design or develop the site.
Before explaining the differences between these two perspectives of website design, it is essential to understand the meaning and to be familiar with their process and what functions they take.
We carry out web design services in Surrey, so have plenty of experience here.
What is web design?
Web design is a creative process that leads to planning, conceptualising, and organising content for the internet.
Web design goes beyond aesthetic to functionality as it comprises many different skills and disciplines in the creation and maintenance of websites.
Giving a website quality web design requires essential elements that enable it to STAND OUT and also deliver an impressive user experience.
In the process of creating a website a web designer must ensure the following elements:
1. PURPOSEFUL LAYOUT AND VISUALS
The overall look of a website encompasses a range of reactions a company/brand wants its visitors to have on the first appearance.
It takes “50 milliseconds” for a website user to form an impression of a website, which will conclude whether they’ll stay or leave the site – that’s your bounce rate.
For elegant website design, there must be a balance between images and text on your page.
A purposeful layout and visuals help to deliver an excellent user experience, thereby giving your audience a notch of interest to interact with and keep engaged and converted for eCommerce.
2. CONSISTENCY
Web design is an essential factor of a website project as it tends to develop flexibility across your entire platform.
Consistency helps to build brand recognition and keep the audience engaged on your web page for a more extended period.
To maintain a consistent brand image on a website, a web designer needs a Style Guide or is there to provide one for you. We at Cream Soda Media help with this branding.
A style guide is a direction of how you want your website to look.
With a style guide, you can determine the color, format, typography, etc., for each page on your website.
It helps to ensure the consistency of your website with other pages each time a new component is enhanced.
Doing this will help the site to extend more modifications down the line and also engage every user longer and create better brand recognition.
3. WEBSITE NAVIGATION
Implementing straightforward navigation for the audience is a key factor for a web designer.
When users access your website, they want to access information fast and direct, within 3 clicks ideally from anywhere on your site.
If website navigation is weak, it discourages audiences from engaging, because most website users don’t want to struggle with finding information on the site, user’s time is tight.
Including broad headings that comprise various subtopics is a way to help your audience find the information, they are searching for quickly, even in this article we break up the sections with bold headers.
A web designer needs to make website navigation reasonable and self-explanatory as most visitors’ attention duration appears to be short.
Attention to menus, sidebars, and footers are clear areas for users to jump to different landing pages.
4. RESPONSIVE WEBSITE DESIGN
Responsive bespoke design helps to guarantee that your audience has a satisfactory experience regardless of the device they use.
Website visitors from various parts of the world will access the website with different devices, comprising smartphones, tablets, and desktop computers.
76% of websites are accessed by mobile, thus putting on a responsive design will ensure you are optimised for all of the target market.
A beautifully optimised design guarantees the audience has a positive experience when using it. Another term for this is UX Design.
With more mobiles and smart devices being used for online web access, due to the advancement of 5G speeds, more reliance on mobile design should be placed here.
Responsive design enables us to keep leads on a website for a longer, helping them to navigate freely and engage more.
5. WEBSITE PAGE SPEED
Website design can be amazing, but it won’t count if your audience doesn’t get to view it. Doing this makes web page speed an essential element of web design.
The page speed of a website enables it to load quickly; users accessing the website can get information quicker.
A typical web page should have an average loading speed of 2.5 seconds on mobile and 1.28 seconds on desktops.
Designers will optimise artwork and image sizes to maintain low loading speeds, which is now a key Google tick box for SEO score.
What is web development?
Web development is a website creation process that involves enhancing the website for hosting via intranet or the internet.
In the case of web development, web developers take the design created and organise an operational website using CSS, JavaScript, HTML, PHP, etc, to give rise to the design files.
Our digital marketing agency front page has that embedded on the opening page.
As we all understand, web development is the wisdom of being capable to formulate effective web solutions.
Every web developer needs to know HTML, CSS, and Javascript from the back end to the front end.
Web developers are vital for responsive web design as they are capable of automatically personalising a web page layout based on what device or platform a web visitor uses to access the website.
For this reason, it is proven that web development is essential for the success of generating more visitors.
Reasons You Need a Web Designer And Web Developer
You need designers and developers for the execution of a balanced website. It’s essential to know the role of both when searching for the right individual. Think of a web designer driving the initial concept on photoshop, the architect laying out the vision. The web developer is then the construction team, piecing it together and providing clearance and sign off that all the lifts and lights work!
Roles Of Web Designer In Website Creation
- Retain sufficient techniques in graphic design and logo design.
- Have a decent sentiment for user experience (UX), to recognise the most straight forward strategy for the task. It encompasses the layout, buttons, images, fonts and the general format of the website.
- He/she must adhere to the branding of the website, color palettes to manipulate, typography and readability of the website.
- Have an understanding of software tools such as the Adobe Photoshop, Framer, or Sketch to create the final layout design of the website.
Roles of a web developer in website creation
The web creation process is incomplete if it does not pass through an effective web development process. A web developer is the one who turns web design into a live website with the use of web languages and software tools to formulate the design and functionality.
For a successful website, a web developer must do the following;
- Capable in JavaScript libraries, styling processors, and framework to fasten the process of web development.
- Establish the backbone of the website using terminologies such as MySQL and PHP.
- Use the same IDEs (Integrated Development Environment). This is a software application tool where they code and build the structure of the website.
- Creates the basic frontier through which an audience interrelates with the website. This connection is assembled by developers using HTML, CSS, and Javascript languages.
Importance of web design and web development
Every company needs to understand what impact web development and web design have on the growth of its audience and business.
Let’s look into the top five elements of these two in the improvement of a company.
They set the first impression
Website development and design are important because it helps to impact how your audience perceives your brand.
The first impression you make, will either engage, retain, and convert them, or make them flee and turn to a competitor.
An appealing and updated website (new pages, posts) gives the audience a positive, trustworthy impression of your business. It’s necessary to maintain this to give your audience an optimistic impression.
They both create website consistency
Consistency is a vital factor in the process of website design. Therefore, web design and web development help create this right across your web page.
If your website is consistent, your audience gets familiar with your brand. However, for your website to look professional, you need to have the same styles, fonts, and layout across every eCommerce page. Doing this will help build brand recognition.
It helps to build trust with your audience
A website with poor design or development makes your audience view your site untrustworthy, especially if the design is outdated and there have been no content updates.
Web development and web design are essential in building trust with your audience and making them remain on your website for a more extended period; doing this creates more opportunities for your business to capture those leads.
It benefits your website SEO strategy
Website design can be challenging to understand if you are not familiar with how it works; therefore, aligned development and design make your site SEO friendly.
A developer will understand the right CMS for your site, be it WordPress for example, a solid cornerstone of SEO ready content management systems.
Aside from how content is published on your website, design and development are vital to helping improve your site SEO strategy, therefore, making your site rank well on search engines and creating more awareness of your brand within a wide range.
Both will have background on H1 headers, HTML Tags, Image optimisation Alt Tags, Keyword placement, and will download helpful SEO interfaces like Yoast or All in One, which guide the owner in the future.
It makes page navigation easy
When it comes to having a successful website, your audience must enjoy easy navigation when on your site.
Information provided on your website should be easy to access; for this reason, web pages must have a breakneck loading speed.
Aside from developing the website, the developer takes the role to test the pages for ease of navigation regularly.
They do this to help eliminate bugs that may impede the ease of loading the web pages.
Conclusion on Web Designer or Developer
As the internet world evolves, web development and web design have played a vital role in the website creation process, thereby helping companies create more awareness of their brand.
Web design and web development could be misunderstood, especially in the case of businesses in search of a website or website redesign. This article aims to clarify the common fallacy that web development and web design are the same.
