Your looking at building a new website or updating an existing website. Most people don’t know which types of professional they should hire. Websites are an interesting space, and you don’t need to know how to write code to put a website online. This makes hiring a web professional hard.
Having a great website built isn’t about hiring the wrong person. It’s more about aligning your website needs with the services that match a web professionals skillset. Did you know there are 3 types of web developers?
- Back-end developers
- Front-end developers
- Web designers
Back-end developers are basically computer programmers who focus on writing code for Web applications. They can create content management systems, security features, and data management tools. If something is wrong at the hosting level on the web server, they know how to correctly configure databases and code environments behind these.
When your project has a good back-end developer it gives you the security and flexibility needed to keep sites running, gather information about users, and give users access to specific website areas.
Font-end developers are more experienced with developing tools that will enhance the user’s experience (aka UX Design). If you have a website design idea that needs to function on multiple devices, then you want to hire a front-end web developer. Many of these experts have some back-end experience as well. This is that Jack-of-all-trades person.
Web designers don’t usually have as much experience with the computer programming side of things. They will know the basics of HTML, CSS, and other common tools, but they aren’t the people you want to rely on in the long run. Web designers will build and design websites, but if something happens to your website like a hack they look to a developer to dig into the code.
They are, however, the people you need to create professional graphics that will appeal to your site’s visitors. Web designers might also layout an overall concept that tells the developers where to build important features.
A web design team. Websites today are complex, and companies need to hire web teams that can work together to create highly dynamic websites. It’s not like it was 20 years ago where one person could build a website. The most complicated thing at that time was making some text animate. Now we have to make sites that work well on multiple devices with screen size and processing power. Web hosting environments are different as well. Sites are larger now, and with faster internet we can serve up larger images and video.
A reliable Web team will have at least one developer and designer. The best ones often have multiple developers and designers who can work together to make a website that matches the client’s unique situations. Once the website is built, you benefit from having a team of experts to support the website long term.
A well developed online entity is important, and the website design should be responsive to address all types of devices. This means that no matter if the user is on a desktop or is accessing the site remotely via an iPad with a mobile or satellite Internet connection, the user experience should remain consistent.
