The two job titles really do sound similar at first glance but website developers and website designers perform very different roles and each engage with different aspects in the process of building a website. A website designer has their focus on the parts of a website that you can see – the visual “front end” parts. This gives them a small but important influence on the user experience because they are behind the way a site looks and have the task of making the site visually appealing to the target demographic.

Website developers are the people who take the design concepts from the designers and write the code that turns those abstract concepts into functioning, useable websites. This means that the web developer is ultimately responsible for ensuring positive user experiences because it is the developer that builds the functionality into the site while making it match the designer’s vision.

If the website is going to be effective it is incredibly important to get both parts of the website creation process right. Poor design work will leave you with a site that does not look appealing and so will not be attractive to customers or create a positive first impression. As a result poor quality design work can cost you customers who find your site off putting and decide to move on. Perhaps more seriously poor quality development work will leave you with a website that simply does not work, with obvious negative implications for customer engagement. In either case your website would fail in its mission to increase your customer base and grow you business.

We certainly would not want to give you the impression that one aspect of web creation is more important than the other however. If you intend to build an effective and engaging website you are going to need to employ the skills of both. The purpose of a website designer is to visualise a website that looks good, is user friendly and is attractive and engaging enough to keep users on the site for the longest possible time. The designer also has to consider what functions the site needs to be capable of performing to achieve the website’s aims and which pages should be linked to which other pages.

At our web design agency in Lancashire our talented team of experienced website designers work to create the general layout of a site, including considering how to include elements that will encourage “conversion” – that is to say elements that will convert visitors into customers. Our designers give careful thought to how they can attract site user’s attention to the areas of the screen that contain the information the site owner needs them to focus on, and how to guide the site user through the website in a way that feels intuitive and straightforward.

Our design team is also concerned with designing the web pages in such a way as to make sure they look good on a variety of different devices. In these hyper connected times designers must consider that web users may be viewing a website on a laptop, a mobile ‘phone, a tablet or even an internet enabled television. That is a staggering variety of different shapes and sizes of screen that a web designer has to bear in mind when considering their design.

Any web designer worth their salt will also keep themselves up to date with the latest standards in best practice, as well as the latest web design trends. Here at seoBusiness it is both our designers’ job and their passion to select the right colour palettes, the most appropriate imagery and the most appropriate fonts. This means that they need to be fully across the latest visual fashions and have a good understanding of not only what people find attractive now, but what they are likely to find attractive for the next few years so that the website has some future-proofing built in.

By contrast the work of our team of website developers is much less obviously on display to the public. Website developers take on the responsibility of building and maintaining a website’s core structure. They work directly with the code to constructing the architecture of the site and realise the website designer’s vision by building the website and making it work. It might help to think of a website developer as being to a website what a construction company is to a new house, while the designer has the role of the architect. The developer takes the design plans and blueprints created by the designer and constructs a fully functional robust structure in line with that design.

As you see, website designers and website developers have roles that are very different but ultimately complimentary in nature. There are of course people who can wear both hats, but we often find that it is much better to have two people working together in collaborative process that encourages the discussion of ideas. When experienced creative professionals have the opportunity to bounce their ideas around and get feedback they can often come up with a much better end product that they would ever have created by themselves.

Our web design agency in Lancashire offers our clients the full package. We have people on staff who are highly experienced in web development and people with tremendous skills in web design. Blackburn, and the North West in general is something of a hidden treasure in the world of tech. There is a commonly held misconception in some quarters that the best minds gravitate towards slick sounding tech firms in London with offices that have a good view of the Shard. Perhaps once there might have been some truth in that. But now the world class universities in Liverpool, Manchester and elsewhere in the North West are producing hugely talented graduates with the skills, creativity and enthusiasm that make them perfectly qualified for careers as leading website designers and website developers.

The bright lights of London and the South East are not as attractive as they once were. Increased opportunities in the North West mean that many, if not most of those graduates have no interest in migrating to the over-crowded and overpriced South East and are staying in the North West. This means that when we need to recruit people to do web design in Blackburn we are drawing from a massive pool of highly qualified talent and have no difficulty in finding people with the newest, freshest ideas and are well versed in the very latest design thinking.

So while many people have been surprised that they found the best web design in Blackburn you can see that locating our web design agency in Lancashire was one of the best things that we could have done. We are able to recruit website developers and website designers that are at the top of their field without having to incur the overheads associated with maintaining office space in central London or the South East.

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