Design and Development

What’s the difference between a designer and a developer? A lot of people assume that these terms are synonymous, but they are increasingly found on different teams in large organizations. There are other roles in the software development space that are also needed to ensure that the finished product is reliable and usable.

Designer

A designer typically creates a graphical representation of a website or a piece of software, making decisions about colours, typography, branding, and increasingly, how the information is organized on a website (often in conjunction with a specialist copy editor). The software they use is often a high-fidelity mockup tool like Figma or Zeplin, which can also represent the user’s journey through the website, from signing up to making a purchase.

Developer

A developer writes the underlying code that will realize the design. They might be writing dynamic components like search pages, organizing the code in the most efficient way, ensuring that it is high quality code, fixing bugs, running tests, making sure the website loads quickly. Development is still a creative endeavour because it involves writing elegant code that other developers can use, and collaborating with designers and the product team to share their knowledge of usability, accessibility, and website performance.

Front-end and back-end

Developer roles are often divided into front-end (the developer who builds the web pages and components that visitors will see) and back-end (the developer who takes care of the underlying database, and the code that sends data to the front end of the website).

Software and websites

There is also a distinction between web development (creating and maintaining websites, which are largely content-focused, such as online shops or newspapers) and software development (creating and maintaining web applications like travel booking websites, customer relationship management tools, or virtual learning sites).

Product manager

A product manager evaluates the effectiveness of different designs and components by monitoring website visitor statistics (the most important one being how many people bought the product). They will use tools like Amplitude and Google Analytics to track visitors’ journeys through the website, and make recommendations for new features based on their findings. The product manager needs to understand website metrics and A/B experimentation, user journeys, user experience, design, and development.

There are two other important roles in a development team: the team leader or manager, and the quality assurance engineer.

Quality assurance

The quality assurance engineer creates automated tests (visual regression, functional regression, and continuous integration tests) and manual tests of the software or website that the developers are working on.

Team leader

The team leader protects the team from distraction so they can get on with their work, mentors the team, liaises with higher management, and organizes sprints and team meetings. They need to be able to understand agile methodologies.

At Carnelian Web Services, all these functions are rolled into one person: me. So when you hire us to build your website, you’re getting the product of a single creative mind, which gives you a more cohesive service.