How to Harness the Differences Between Designers and Developers

Working within the web development industry can make you a very inflexible person, or a dreadfully flexible person. It actually is dependent on your grit.

I have the advantage of having both skills: designer in addition to developer, which has aided me a great deal in charting my way through the untamed seas of website design and development.

I learnt rather early on in the game that creative designers think like designers… and developers are a totally different creature! Where, when a designer puts together a web site, he is concerned more with how it looks. That concern makes him concentrate on the minutiae of where this line sits, how faraway from that other line and that image it must be, its tint as well as width… in essence style. Internet designers are the Prada’s and Chanel’s of the web site creation process.

On the other hand, web builders are very seriously interested in HOW a website works. Yes, there is a healthy element of how it looks, but the same takes a back seat weighed against performance.

When you visit Google’s homepage, the same simple page was the result of various concessions on the part of the designers and the developers. The creative designers will possibly have wanted a background image, and a picture of a smiling woman, or cute puppy sitting somewhere on the homepage, but the engineers would have said it would add to page-load time, and cost more in terms of bandwidth, that consumers would have to wait longer downloading worthless, value-less data, reducing the amount of webpages viewed per visit…and so on and so on.

This battle involving website design experts and website development gurus can make or break a development. If creative designers cannot influence the developers, also known as the website developers, to accept some visually appealing piece of design, it might mean extra labor undoing plus redesigning what had already been approved by a client. This alone could add weeks to what would have been a day’s work.

Having worked on both sides of the fence, here is what I can advise:

At all times have teams, creative designers and developers, present in preliminary conferences with the client. That alone will make sure everyone is aware of what is possible and what is not.
Openly define the working goals.
Do not allow the client run the show…but instead, keep him or her fully apprised of what is happening and as involved as possible.
Before designers start their work, they must be in accord with developers on expectations.
In the final summary, how a site works is more important than how it looks, but it is the customer who decides in the end, so the client, the website designer and the web developers, must all yield to the king…the end user…

Percy Lawrence is a search engine optimization developer and online marketer from South Africa

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