There is lots of talk what the developers role is and the difference between designer and developer – but why am I a web developer not designer?… Is there such a thing as a web designer?
As you can see from the title of this site I class myself as a developer but why? Put simply to make a website function you DO NOT need design it just makes it easier on the eye, prime example is cssnakedday (take away all design/colours/images and the site should still be workable). To get a website on the internet you do not need any design skill – a websites main role is the functionality and linking of pages – a lot of the time it would be better to strip the so called design.
The “designer” just makes the site clearer and gives it that warmth and ease of use for the visitor. From my few years experience a lot of websites are designed by people from a print background that have adapted with the change where designing for web is a completely different kettle of fish – some grasp it better than others.
I admit to not being the worlds best designer however I don’t think as a developer you can ignore what is looking good on your page and what is looking bad. When developing a site you see the same pages over and over again so I think this hinders your capabilities of a designer. If you are looking at the same thing over and over again repeatedly you are going to miss little things plus I’m concentrating on functionality of how to get things to function than the smaller design led changes.
For example if you had two days to develop a site I’m going to concentrate on functionality/coding and split my time according and make that my priority say 80% that gives me 20% to apply styles. That 20% isn’t going to be enough to apply all styles and design to a page
So I guess it comes to down to priorities if you are building a data driven website which requires functionality you need to spend more time to get it to work than applying the design as without the functionality you have no website at all – hence why I see myself as a web developer – that design means nothing if you have no structure it just helps a hell of a lot in getting traffic to your site.
Although design is an important factor without the development knowledge – you have no website. I spend a lot of my time creating layouts and styling using css – is this design? Yes but I’m yet to met a designer that can produce semantic HTML/CSS no doubt they are out there though. I could go on and on but I’ll leave it there…for today
Things I am not are “A techie”
Post by: Richard
Tags: CSS, Design, development, xhtml