W E S T B A Y . D I G I T A L

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Today, when it comes to the success of your website or product, UI/UX is the deciding factor.

Don’t believe me? Check these stats out.

Research suggests that 75% of people base their trust in a brand from their website user experience. Over 38% of visitors will cease to interact with a website if they find it visually unappealing. Moreover, 40% of people will move on if they find a website is not mobile-friendly.

It’s a sobering statistic, isn’t it? But that’s great news for those looking at building a career in web designing.

There’s no better time to be a part of the web design industry than today, with a host of career options available (UX designer, UI designer, Visualizer, Web developer and more). However, when starting in your design career, it can be overwhelming to understand which areas to focus on and prioritize.

You can’t eat the whole cake in one sitting, you need to break it up into manageable chunks and achieve mastery one skill at a time.

We’ve created this checklist of essential Design Skills that every web designer must master to help you in advancing your design career.

Since innovations are disrupting the UI/UX industry every day, you’ll have to keep re-evaluating your skills to remain updated with the trends.

Who is a Web Designer?

A web designer is someone who, simply put, designs websites, keeping in mind the clients’ needs and the final user experience. The three aspects which a web designer focuses on are appearance, layout, and in some cases content. Appearance consists of factors such as colors, fonts, and images whereas layout include structure and categorization.

A website with a minimalist and simple aesthetic always catches the eye and helps in earning the trust of the target audience.

In the end, the three factors in a website which contribute to good user experience look, feel, and usability.

A Web Designer VS A Web Developer: What’s The Difference?

designer vs developer

Many people get confused between the roles of a web designer and a web developer. Although their roles are interdependent, their job descriptions, tools and resources used, and skills and personality requirements differ to a great extent.

A web designer deals with the visual elements of a website. His/her job is to ideate on the style, look and aesthetics of a website. S/he uses design tools such as Photoshop and sometimes coding tools such as HyperText Markup Language (HTML) and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). There are three types of web designers: User Experience (UX) Designer, User Interface (UI) Designer, and Visual Designer.

A web developer, on the other hand, is one who brings the ideas of web designers to life. S/he is responsible for creating the foundation and structure of the website with the help of tools such as Javascript and JQuery. There are three types of web developers: Back-end Developers, Front-end Developers, and Full-stack Developers.

So you can figure out from the above description that a web developer’s job is to build while a web designer’s job is to tell the developer what to build. This infographic illustrates the difference between a web designer and a web developer beautifully.