Web Designer vs Web Developer What’s the Difference?

Overview

A website has become an important aspect for companies for businesses, but building a website involves a lot of stages and also requires specialized knowledge and skills. Web designers and web developers are two essential roles in the website development process, each with their unique area of expertise. A web designer primarily focuses on the visual aspect or user interface of a website. In contrast, a web developer is responsible for all technical responsibilities like converting the design to code, implementing business logic, and database management. Let us explore further web design vs web development in this article.

The Role Of A Web Designer

A web designer is responsible for all the visual aspects of a website. The main objective of a web designer is to attract users with the design and convey the company's objectives. Some major roles of a web designer based on the context of web designer vs web developer are,

Designing the layout of the website in consideration of the objectives of the business.
Thinking and implementing the user interface for the website. The user interface must be user-friendly and easy to access and use.
Creating responsive designs that will adapt to different screen sizes for users that access the website from different devices like mobiles, tablets, laptops, and computers. This provides a good user experience to the user.
The designer must understand the type of data that will be received from the backend and create designs based on the data. For example, if large numerical data is present, a designer may create a data table or stunning visualization to easily convey the information to customers.
A designer must ensure that the design must not break when a large amount of data or logical errors occur.
The designer must keep updated on the latest design trends which may help to improve the design or user interface of the website.

The User Interface is the interaction point between a user and features in a website. Designers aim to create an easy-to-use and visually appealing UI, following design principles like consistency, simplicity, and feedback.

Types of Web Designers

Web designers can also be classified specifically to their skills in the development of a part of a website.

User Experience (UX)

A User Experience designer is responsible for implementing the features in the website that are user-friendly, engaging, and match the overall requirements of customers. They are concerned with the overall user experience of using the website, including usability, navigation, and organization or alignment of content in the website. UX designers also conduct research and usability testing to ensure that websites are optimized for the usage of customers.

User Interface (UI)

A User Interface designer is responsible for designing the visual elements of a website, including layout, colors that should be used, and typography of the text. They work closely with UX designers to ensure that the visual design aligns with the user experience goals. They also work with visualizations and stunning animations to improve the interactability of the website.

Visual

A Visual designer is responsible for creating visual assets such as images, icons, and logos for the company that is to be used in the website. They work with UI designers to create a consistent visual flow in the website. These images are made based on the layout and color theme of the website to achieve a clean and neat design.

UX Designers	UI Designers	Visual Designers
Concerned about understanding user needs and designing the user experience.	Primarily focus on designing the interface through which users interact with a website or application.	Focuses on graphics in the websites and also factors like color and typography of the website.
Create user scenarios, design wireframes, and prototypes, and conduct usability testing.	Create interface elements, such as buttons, menus and design visual layouts of the website	Create logos and style guides, select color palettes and typography, and design graphics and illustrations.
The major skills are research, information architecture, and interaction design.	The major skills are user interface design, design, and prototyping	The major skills are Graphic design, branding, typography, and color theory.

Web Designer Skill Sets

Web designers must be creative in choosing the color, typography, and layout to create visually appealing websites. We can list some skills that are required from a web designer based on the context of web designer vs web developer.

Web designers must be good at designing graphics for a website. They need to be experienced in using graphic design tools such as Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, and Sketch.
They must also be familiar with design tools like Figma, which can be used to create designs, prototypes, and collaboration.
Web designers must be able to design responsive websites that can adapt and be accessible in different screen sizes.
Web designers also should have a good understanding of the usage of HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) to create the structure of a website and CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) to style and layout the website's content.
They should have an understanding of design principles and be able to implement User experience designed websites that are user-friendly and provide a good user experience.
Web designers should have a good understanding of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) principles to design websites that are optimized for search engines. SEO optimization has a direct influence on the ranking of websites by web browsers and therefore, web designers should know the usage of keywords and meta tags to rank their websites higher.

The Role of a Web Developer

The major responsibilities of a web developer are creating, and maintaining websites. Web developers create websites with web frameworks using programming languages like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Some of the major roles of web developers based on the context of web designer vs web developer have been discussed below,

Web developers are in charge of developing the design into a website using HTML, CSS, and javascript. They must also implement a responsive design website for accessing the website from multiple devices.
Web developers are responsible for the security of the website. They must implement security measures to prevent the website from cyber attacks and hacking. Some of the important security measures are SSL certificates, firewalls, and antivirus software. They must also ensure the code is free from any vulnerabilities.
They must also have a strong understanding of algorithms and should have critical thinking skills to implement the business logic through the website. This includes the services provided to the customer through a website.
After building a website, web developers are also responsible for maintaining the website. This involves fixing bugs, updating content, and ensuring that a website is always up-to-date with the latest security tools and technologies.
They must also have an understanding of search engine optimizations. They must use various search engine optimization techniques to improve a website's ranking in search engine results pages.
Yet another important role of aweb developeris to ensure that a website is compatible with different browsers. As technology evolves, some functions and code become deprecated in some browsers and servers. Web developers must update such functions to ensure the working of a website on all browsers.

Types of Web Developers

Web developers have been classified into different types based on the technologies of their expertise.

Front-end

A front-end developer is responsible for implementing the design of a website using markup languages like HTML, EJX, styling languages, or libraries like CSS, SCSS, tailwind, bootstrap, and programming languages like JavaScript. They also collaborate more with UI and UX designers to ensure that the website's design is translated into functional code. They are also responsible for the responsive nature of the website and adding attractive visualizations or animations to a webpage.

Back-end

A back-end developer is responsible for creating and maintaining the server side of a website. They will implement the logic and code that will be used to interact with the database for fetching and updating data. They will collaborate with front-end developers to ensure that the website's functionality is working correctly and that the website can handle the data from the backend and user traffic.

Full-stack

A full-stack developer is responsible for both front-end and back-end development. They have a comprehensive understanding of the entire web development process and can develop websites from start to finish. They usually use frameworks like angular, react, ruby on rails, vue, etc... to create a website. Full-stack developers are highly skilled and in demand, as they can work on any project.

Web Developer Skill Sets

The skills needed for a web developer change over time as new web technologies are continuously being introduced to develop a website in more effective ways. The following skills usually denote a skilled web developer based on the context of web designer vs web developer,

A web developer should have a strong foundation in programming languages such as HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. HTML is used to create the fundamental structure of a website, CSS is used to design the website, and JavaScript is used to add business logic and interactivity.
Web frameworks such as React, Angular, Vue, and Ruby on Rails are used to build web applications quickly and efficiently. A web developer should have a good understanding of at least one web framework to create complex large-scale web applications. Frameworks like NextJs and Gatseby are highly valued skills as they provide server side rendering features.
Web developers must also have a basic understanding of the working and management of cloud services and content delivery networks (CDN) to host and optimize websites.
Good understanding of databases and experience in using the APIs of databases to interact with the database to query for data and insert data into the database.
Version control systems such as Git are used to manage changes to source code over time. A web developer should be able to use version control systems to track changes, collaborate with other developers, and maintain the integrity of the codebase.
A web developer should have a good understanding of Seach Engine Optimization(SEO) techniques to improve the ranking of a website in search engine results pages. SEO techniques include using keywords, and meta tags, and creating quality content that will make the website rank higher.
A web developer also should understand the importance of testing and debugging techniques to ensure that the website works as intended. There are multiple libraries according to the used frameworks for testing and debugging. Tools such as Selenium automate testing for finding errors and it is the role of the developer to fix such errors.

A content delivery network (CDN) is a network of servers that provide fast web content delivery globally, reducing latency and improving website performance by storing frequently requested content and delivering it from a nearby server.

Server Side Rendering (SSR) is a performance improvement technique where the server renders the webpage before sending it to the client.