Working within the web development trade can make you a very hard person, or a dreadfully soft person. It certainly depends on your mettle.
I have the benefit of having both skills: designer in addition to developer, which has served me a great deal in charting my path through the untamed seas of site design and development.
I learnt fairly early in the game that 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 like. That concern makes him concentrate on the details of where this line sits, how far from that other line and that copy it should be, its color in addition to width... in essence style. Internet designers are the Gucci's and Prada s of the website creation process.
On the other hand, web developers are very seriously engrossed in HOW a website works. Fair enough, there is a healthy element of how it looks like, but that takes a back seat weighed against functionality.
When you visit Google's homepage, that simple page was the result of various concessions on the part of the designers and the developers. The designers will in all probability have wanted a background picture, and a picture of a smiling woman, or cute dog 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 users would have to wait longer downloading useless, value-less material, reducing the amount of webpages seen for every visit...and so on and so on.
This battle among website design experts and website development gurus can make or break a development. If creative designers can't convince the developers, also known as the website developers, to accept some visually appealing piece of design, it may well mean new labor undoing and 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:
1. At all times have teams, designers and developers, there in preliminary meetings with the client. That alone will make sure everyone knows what is possible and what is not.
2. Plainly define the working goals
3. Do not let the client run the show...but instead, keep him or her fully apprised of what is happening and as involved as possible.
4. Before designers start their work, they must be in concurrence with developers on expectations.
5. 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...
Tips: Developing The Perfect Web Dev Team
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