As any of the designers/developers at Adido will tell you, it is important to plan ahead. Knowing what you want is an important part of the web design and development process. But what are the differences between the two and how to they relate to each other? Let’s look at a real world example here at Adido, using Paul, Jamie and Ross.
Paul is a web designer. His job is to tell us how the website will look. He has an eye for detail and brings his artistic talent to bear on any project he works on. After some discussion with the client and a few concept designs, Paul will produce an image that looks like a finished website.
Jamie (that’s me) is a front end web developer. My job is to take Paul’s work and pass it onto the development team in a form that they can work with. Basically I create a website to look like Paul’s design. If it was a building, my end product would be an empty structure with no plumbing, no electric. It looks, however, like a finished product.
Ross is a web developer (in fact he’s the boss of development). Ross’ job is to take my website and make it work. Again, using the building analogy, Ross puts in all the plumbing, wiring and generally makes the building/website functional. Nothing much changes visually, but the website will actually start working as intended.
Every change that one of the three makes can affect the other two. Ross can’t add new pages without making sure Paul has a design for them, just as Paul can’t add pages into the design that haven’t been agreed upon by the development team. Without clear boundaries there are a thousand ways a developer and designer can start treading on each others’ toes.
The most important thing to know before you start creating a website is to know what it will do. Where does this link go? What should this button do? What text boxes should be on this form? If you know all this, then Paul can create a design that incorporates every facet of the finished website. Jamie can build the website with development in mind, and Ross can work efficiently without having pages redesigned to incorporate functionality that wasn’t thought of in advance.
What happens if you do not plan ahead? Designers and developers will trip over each other making changes and progress will slow while every change is run by the client repeatedly. And at the end you might have a website that makes a lot of noise but doesn’t go very far. This blunderbuss of a website will cost a great deal more than it should have.
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