How to Choose to Be a Web Designer or a Web Developer?

At present, the boundaries between web designers and web developers are getting blurred. More and more designers began to learn to code, and developers are beginning to pay close attention to design theory. Is a web developer the same as a web designer? This article tells the differences in the salary, job description, skills, tools, and how to make choice between them.

Salary for Web Designer vs. Web Developer

1. What’s the salary for web designer?

As of October 30, 2017, the average salary of web designers is $ 73,204, usually, it’s in the range of $ 62,669 to $ 83,659. However, it depends on various factors and may vary widely.

HR provided as of October 30, 2017

The figure above is the expected percentage of American web designer salary, which is lower than the annual salary. For example, the average expected annual salary of a typical web designer in the United States is $ 73,204, so 50% of those working as web designers in the United States are expected to be less than $ 73,204.

2. What’s the salary for web developers?

As of October 30, 2017, the annual salary for Web Developer III is $ 101,962, usually in the range of US $ 92,359 to $ 116,497, depending on various factors and may vary widely.

The chart depicts the expected percentage of people working for network software developers in the United States, which is less than the annual salary. For example, the median annual salary expected of a typical U.S. network software developer is $ 77,458, so 50% of those who work as network software developers in the United States are expected to be less than $ 77,458.

Requirement Difference Between Web Designers and Web Developers

Usually, people are not clear about the conceptual difference between web design and web development, there are both differences and connections between them. The most obvious is that the former is about the visual or aesthetic aspect of the site, called "designer"; the other is the invisible design of the coding side, called "developer." In short, the beautiful web interface was originally created by web designers, and the developer is responsible for turning the nice image into a page that really shows to the visitors.

1. What is a web designer?

Usually, web designers are responsible for the design of the visual layout of websites. Excellent designers are good at the using of a variety of concepts, such as color collocation, typesetting, spatial relations and user experience.

Through the use of graphic design software and prototyping tools, web designers could create the initial version of a website. Then the completed design will pass to web developers for coding.

Design tools for web designers:

Adobe

Photoshop

Illustrator

Sketch

Prototyping tools:

UXPin

Mockplus

Job descriptions:

Responsible for the overall performance style positioning of the website and to provide an overall visual perception of users;

Responsible for the prototyping design;

Carry out the graphic design of the product catalog;

Carry out various activities of advertising design;

Assist developers in page design and other work.

In general, designers are responsible for using their own aesthetic knowledge with a variety of tools to design a beautiful page. A good designer can grasp the entire product style of the company, providing the first impression for customers. It’s lucky to find excellent designers for a company.

2. What is a web developer?

Web developers are generally considered as a group of people who use the left brain to develop the coding of products. Under normal circumstances, Web developers get the design of the page from the Web designer and then use front-end development technology to encode these pages. They do not really care if the page looks good or not, but they care about the clean code very much. Outstanding developers are always paying more attention to details and focusing on each of them.

What the skills and tools they should master as follows:

Source code management tools: SVN, CVS, Git, etc;

IDE: WebStorm, Sublime, VS Code, etc. All these are excellent IDE, you can choose and master any one of them;

Front-end development technology: HTML, JavaScript, CSS and so on

Front-end framework: jQuery, React, Bootstrap and so on

In recent years, front-end development is a hot-seat. Consequently, the skill requirements are getting higher and higher, and of course, the level of web developers’ salary also increased correspondingly. At present, it’s a good time to enter the front-end development industry.

But, Web Designer Can’t Ignore Coding Completely

Qualified web designers should understand the code better than graphic designers and understand design better than programmers. As the creator of beautiful web pages, it is their ultimate goal to make a website that will shock users.

In addition, to enhance with superb code writing technology, it’s also necessary for good web developers to cultivate a strong aesthetic ability. Improve themselves with the more profound development of knowledge to achieve the designer's function prototype or visual effects chart.

Conclusion

In the development of the Internet, the designers and developers are always playing an indispensable role. The debate between web designer vs. web developer, web design vs. graphic design is always non-stopped. Each profession is meaning for the development of the Internet, as well as people’s work. As new entrants, it’s smart to know the differences of salary, the job description, as well as what should you learn to devote yourself in. I hope this article clarified the differences between web designer and web developer, and will help you to decide how to make a choice between them.