You’ve just opened your company, and now you need a website. The first thing that comes to your mind is to visit a website like Bark.com, and seek for a Service Provider that will build your website. You just entered the word “web” in their search box, and it suggested you those options:
- Web Design
- Web Development
- And on, and on
And now you look at the screen thinking: “Wait a second, what’s the difference? Why do they have Web Design and Web Development?”
Web Design vs Web Development
A web designer is responsible for the look and feel of your website. Web designers focus on making your website attractive, intuitive, and aligned with your brand. Web designers create layouts, color schemes, typography, and other visual elements.
Web Designer
- Creating Layouts – starts with the emotion and builds backwards to get the website users excited.
- Stays On-Brand – follows your brand identity guidelines to make it seem consistent everywhere.
- User Experience (UX) – creates a flow that’s intuitive to your ideal customer.
- Mobile-First – begins with how it looks on a smartphone to have smooth transition for all devices.
A web developer is writing the code that makes your website functional. Web developers focus on doing front-end (what users see and interact with) or back-end (the server side and database management), or both full-stack developers
Web Developer
- Coding – using front-end and back-end technologies to build your website
- Database Management – stores the data separately to make it traceable and persistent.
- Website Performance – improves the loading time to reduce the chances of frustrating users.
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – uses target keywords to help you rank higher in search results.
Who Should You Hire And When
It depends! Let’s have a look at few common scenarios to determine whether you need to Hire a Web Designer or a Web Developer:
I want to build my website from scratch
Then you need to hire both a Web Designer and Web Developer, and instead of hiring both separately, you can simply hire a digital agency.
I want to refresh the design of my website
You will be perfectly fine hiring a Web Designer only. They can usually tweak your website quite a lot without breaking it.
I want to add new features to my website
Hire a Web Developer only. They can create all sorts of internal tools and extra functionality utilizing your existing website design.
I want to launch a new website
This can be tricky. It depends if you want to reuse the functionality, or the design of your existing websites. You might have to hire both.
Now You Know Who To Hire
Now you should be feeling comfortable deciding whether to hire a Web Designer or Web Developer. But should you choose a Freelancer or Digital Agency? The short answer is hire a Digital Agency when you need both, and a Freelancer when you don’t need them both. Working with freelancers will be less expensive, except when you hire more than one it may result in a costly experience due to lack of coordination as a team.
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