The Difference between a web Designer and a web Developer

Web designer and web developer are two different words but there are huge differences between those roles. It looks like same, but if you dig into deep, you will understand various differences. I believe, at the end of this article will give you a clear idea to identify who is web designer and who is web developer. Recently this has become a hot debate among people. Therefore, we will look at those job roles separately.

Who is a web designer?

A web designer someone who is creative and mainly focus on the layout of the website. The designer has the potential to apprehend what is wanted to make a website functional and smooth, but at the same time make it aesthetically appealing to the web browsers. Basically, website designers working on the front end of the website. Web designer is responsible for user interface and the user experience. Colours, Graphics, Images and the layout of the website depend on designer’s skills. Following are the main tools and jobs that a web designer mainly focus when designing a website.

• Adobe Creative Suite (Photoshop, Illustrator) or other design software
• Graphic design
• Logo design
• Layout/format
• Placing call-to-action buttons
• Branding
• Wireframes, mock-ups, and storyboards
• Color palettes
• Typography

Who is a web developer?

Basically, web developer is responsible for the back end of the website. This means, the developers are specialized with coding and programming languages. 

Website developers should be able to concentrate and pay attention to details and need to familiar with technology. And also must understand how web servers operate. In order to do that the developers should have the knowledge of many software programs, web applications and web programming languages.

In website developing, there are three different sides. Client-side scripting, server-side scripting and database technology are the different parts of the developer skills.

Client – side scripting means that determining what the people want to see when landing a company website.

Here are some client-side languages:

•             HTML

•             CSS

•             JavaScript

•             Flash

•             JQuery

•             Microsoft Silver light

How does a website works and code execute at the back end is called server-side scripting.

The following are examples of server-side languages:

•             ASP.NET

•             C

•             Java

•             PHP

•             Python

•             Ruby

The third part is the database technology.

These relational database management systems (RDBMS) are the most popular for web-based applications:

•             Oracle

•             Microsoft SQL Server

•             MySQL

•             IBM DB2

•             Apache

•             MongoDB

However, if the website design project is huge those sections will be distributed between web designers, programmers and developers.

Apart from the job description, if you look at the wages there is no huge difference. Like I mentioned people can think they are both same or there are two different careers.

To conclude, there are some people have the skills and interesting to learn both web design and development. Learning coding can be hard but worth it. In my personal opinion, all the designers should know how to do the coding. Having both skills can handle a large scale of web design project.

I believe that there is a slightly difference between web designers and web developers. Some people can do the both jobs to be effective.

Most of the affordable web design companies have one person to do all the work. But, large website design companies have both web designers and the developers.