It's important to understand that web design is the visual layout of a site, while development is the actual coding work. Some web designers will also do some amount of limited development, while in other cases you might hire a specialist designer to design your brand, web look and feel, and then hire a developer to build it.
An important question to decide on is whether you plan to hire an agency to design and develop your site, or a freelancer. The answer is usually a factor of how much you want to spend.
If you can shell out for an agency, you will take a lot of the risk and trouble out of the equation, as they tend to provide more holistic services in a more reliable, easy-to-handle manner. However, you are also going to be paying a lot more, as agencies need to have sales people, as well as multiple levels of staff involved.
If you are going to use an agency you may wish to look for a smaller one that is somewhere in between a freelancer and full-blown interactive shop. This will usually yield the benefits of working with an agency without the rather large markups that can come with the bigger companies.
Web designers can have varying skill sets depending on whether they specialize more in the design part of their job or in the development part. Typically a designer handles:
Designing a logo, brand, and overall visual identity is something many web designers can do. Although you can actually hire specialized branding designers, often a web designer can produce a decent visual identity at potentially a much lower cost.
The bread-and-butter of a web designer's job is to design the visual layout of your site. They should put together a design of a homepage and typically any other key pages on the site, so for a blog this would include a post/comments page.
If you need graphics that match your website and branding, then a web designer can usually create them. These might include banners for special promotions or articles, info-graphics such as diagrams, advertisements, and so on.
Many web designers can also provide some or all of your web development work. This varies wildly between freelancers, meaning that a web designer will offer one of the following levels of development capability:
Most web designers can do some building, however you will still find people who will only produce the visual part of the job and then either sub-contract or leave it to you to get the design built. Typically ,designers who do no development, are stronger at the branding aspect of the job.
The most basic web development is to turn a design into an HTML site and this is the most common level of development proficiency for web designers. Note that an HTML site is a static site. It then needs to have additional functionality added to it to turn it into a blog theme or to plug it into some other content management system.
Nonetheless, web designers who can build a site into HTML will have delivered a lot of value because it means they can make sure the visual design is carried through to the final site just as they'd intended.
If for example you are using WordPress, then your design needs to be first built into HTML and then turned into a WordPress theme. Web designers who can handle both steps will be able to help you get a very polished finished product.
However, because the skill set is quite broad, it is possible that you will either have a very good visual look but average code, or vice versa. Having said that, there are some very talented people out there who can do the whole job really well!
It's very unlikely that you will find someone who can do both a web designer and web developer's job well. Usually only agencies who have multiple staff will be able to deliver this level of service, and if you can find a single person who can do the whole thing, expect to pay a premium for such talent!
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Cynthia Simmons at
02152011
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