Along with the evolution of internet and website making, changing and increase in the roles of web designer and web developer is rapid. To understand better what are the exact duties of both web designer and web developer, and what tools and technologies are to be used now a days, this article is written to make clear the boundaries.



Web designer is responsible to design the overall layout and look of the web site. This covers the area from design small and meaningful icons or creating logos to complete the web layout and present it in html format. Web designer is the one who knows which colors to select, and what images should be placed where, to greatly communicate the business sense of client. How to make page attractive for target audience? Whether it demands some flash intro or some other flash effects or the simple site will present the elegance of client's organization? Which data is to be displayed at right place to get the best required viewer's concentration? Web Designer's role in the whole website making is to answer the above question practically by making relative web contents.

Now for doing the tasks of web designing what tools and technologies should be learned is the main aspect, as website making is changing and evolving and so is web designing. Web designer is not restricted to one, two or limited number of tools. Web designer is free to use as much tools as he want to produce the best communicative attraction for visitors. But still, there are some tools in market which are setting standards to design a website. Talking from the very beginning of website making there comes the basic look of website, one would like to see, how it looks after the whole story of making. This task begins with template designing usually designed in Adobe Photoshop. The template makes the first prototype of website. Then for filling it with real contents and images, web designer is supposed to use Adobe Illustrator to create icons and logo for website, and Adobe Flash for making intros or some other effects. Even there web designer is not restricted to exactly use Adobe Illustrator to make those icons or logos. Web designer can use some other software tools offered by Ulead and Xara to create 3d logo. After doing this much, turns begin to convert the image file into the html or any web format. For doing this web designer should have knowledge of HTML and layout of web like table based and div based. For the conversion of image to webpage, tools can be used like Adobe Image Ready for object slicing. Now Adobe Image Ready is obsolete and integrated with Adobe Photoshop, this job can be done by using Adobe Fireworks. Adobe Fireworks can be used to create buttons and different stages of button. It is also a great tool to get the object sliced, and prepare a web page in a very easy manner. The last task of web designer is to create CSS (cascading style sheets) for website.

After the finishing of web designer's role, web developer becomes active in website making. Web developer makes logic, functions, and makes the website come alive. Web developer has to look after the working of website's functionality, and he can guess and correct if there is any malfunctioning in website. Web developer has tasks from very basic, like authenticating a user, and as much complex as to develop a complete web application. Tasks in between those two extremes may include following.

Email processing

Building simple function logic

Database handling

Displaying catalogs

Making online forms alive and effective

Dynamic page generation

Development of shopping cart

Payment processing

Development of CMS (Content Management System)

Development of Order Management System

Development of any type of Tracking System

Any type of web application demanded by client.

Web Developer uses different platform, languages or technologies to accomplish the task, but unlike web designer, web developer is sometimes restricted to develop the website in some specific language or platform as per specified by client. Languages used in development of websites include PHP, ASP, JSP. These languages are used to call as server side languages, which run on the server where the website is being hosted and results are calculated on server and sent to the requested browser. There are some scripts which used to run on the client's machine. These scripts can be written in javascript, vbscript, actionscript and other scripting languages.

We may conclude that web designer is the one who should have good aesthetics and able to create good quality web content to attract the target audience efficiently, and the web developer is the one who works on the technical aspects of website and make it functionally available to client and let him do what he desires.

Hope this article will clarify the ambiguity between the roles of web designer vs web developer.