Is web development and web designing directly proportional or not?

hello
Thankyou all for replying to my post and giving me confidence that YES a girl can also be a good web designer i'm new to this field but im very much interested in it,does anyone know the software's used? or have good tutorial links which i can use to learn it? and i am seeing that many people are talking about web designer and web developer can they be both the same person? or is it necessary for a web designer to hire a web developer are they directly proportional to each other or not?, i have some knowledge of html which i learnt from w3schools,but yet again i think i'm not the mature professional type.

 

Well keep it up. I would suggest investing in Dreamweaver...it helped me learn beyound hand coding. As far as "Design" and "Development" are concerned, the are pretty much the same, however, deisgn focuses more on the "look" and development focuses more on the "user" experience (dynamic coding, etc.). The both go hand and hand, so yes, you can do both if you learn both. Good luck!

 

Like SearchBliss says, Dreamweaver is a pretty excellent tool - learn to design and use DW to help you. If you get hold of one of the Adobe Creative suites they'll throw in Flash, Fireworks & Photoshop too.

As for designers & developers, that's an interesting question: designers were traditionally graphic designers making websites look good, whilst developers were more akin to programmers, doing the functionality of sites like the databases and dynamic pages.

Whilst there may still be people specialising in these areas you get designers that need to be able to do dev work and developers who need to style things so the boundaries of the roles certainly do blur, especially when you get specialists like interface designers and information architects etc.

The best advice is to just start designing websites and learn what you need to do along the way. Start fairly small and master the skills you need before adding more skills to your repertoire. Eventually you'll find your way in the web industry and follow a natural path - you could end up managing servers, copywriting, being good at SEO or be a cracking php coder. The world is your oyster

It's totally fine to be a good designer and, if you don't know the coding side so much, get someone to dev for you. That's part of the art of being a designer - knowing if and what your limitations are.

As for girls being good web designers, there are plenty out there, so go for it!

 

web designing and web development fullfill each other.
web design + web development = A good website.

thanks

 

Now for my arrogrant, yet true side of the story.

Simple: Dreamweaver in design mode sucks. It churns out bad, bad code. The whole Spry concept is crap on a stick, its rollover images are terrible. Throws paragraphs around things that aren't paragraphs and trying to validate a page strict in Dreamweaver is not going to happen.

Take my professional opinion: Dreamweaver is shit, do not use it. That is the most valuable advice you will ever receive, do not ignore it.

Web designers are normally not very good. They can do these bloody awesome designs which are too image reliant to be functional, and don't work with images, flash or Javascript disabled. There is a major difference between print and web design.

(SearchBliss - your code sucks (some of the worst I've seen this week), so you aren't in the position to be offering advice).

If you want to, use Firewroks and Photoshop to design your sites, but keep in mind - content is key.

Start by marking up your content without even considering what the site will look like. In pure HTML. Then add CSS to make a barebones layout with colours and boxes, then, and only then open up your image program and add images. Never export as HTML using slices. If you can't code, don't be a web developer. I can't cook, so I ain't gonna be a chef.

Web design is the actual looks. Development is the code - HTML, CSS, PHP, Javascript - whatever.

Designers are rarely good developers and vice versa. So the way I do it is work WITH my designers, they tell me how it should look while sitting on a PC next to me, then they make the images which I optimize and add into the code.

Finallly: Your content and your presentation should always be separate. Do not put non-content images in you HTML,do not use tags like <font> and <center> and make sure your page uses as little code as possible, and passes validation on a strict doctype.

 

Design and development are two very different things.

Its like the architect and builder.

Although in the web industry developers tend to be paid more.

You can do both for the simpler sites but if you wish to get into complex projects e.g. Google Analytics you would need to have your skills located in one area or the other.

Although to be fair whatever area you get into it is advisable to have a little knowledge of the other.

 

developer = project management, internet marketing, SEO, programming etc

designer = artistic designs

You need both to create great websites.

 

True, which is why my advice was to learn to design and use DW to help. It is afterall just a tool.

My professional opinion is that I totally disagree with you there, blueparukia. Whilst someone totally relying on DW to create everything without using their own skills is certainly not good, it is a great tool to assist design/dev/webmaster workflow; and as the old sayings go; "it's not what you've got but what you do with it" and "a bad workman always blames his tools".

Whilst there may still be designers who merely design without other considerations I wouldn't be so bold as to give them a sweeping condemnation like that. For a designer to purely create design without any other considerations in a commercial environment these days is unthinkable.

And of course there is a major difference between web & print, who said there wasn't? But many designers took the leap to web and have honed their skills in both departments - web and print can learn from eachother.

Otherwise you make some fairly valid points but I'd still say that professional designers who know enough to make connecting their skills up with those of devleopers, and vise versa, are the salt of the earth; the world isn't just black & white, there are varying shades of grey in there too.

 

How can you possibly use it to help? Things like autocompletion and auto indenting is a lazy way to do it which can come to mistakes. And even if you can't live without them, Notepad++ and various other editors do it all for free, and generally more comprehensive. Without the cost/massive download. Notepad++ has most of the features of Dreamweaver without design mode - it has a more comprehensive syntax highlighting and text effects range, it has the automativc tidier like Dreamweaver, and even an FTP client. The installer is just over 2MB, compared to Dreamweaver with a whopping 180MB to download at a cost of $400 and it comes with the disadvantages of having things like automatic rollover image maker (WITH Javascript) and this whole concept called design mode...

And the easiest way to fix that is get rid of the tool.

I just checked your site out, 154 validation errors in a design that simple and terrible coding throughout.

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Code (markup):

Could trip rendering bugs in IE. Inline styles in the middle of pages, block elements contained within inline ones (images in spans) and unsemantic stuff like:

<strong>Name:</strong> Lever<br />

Code (markup):

Why is that strong? It should be bold - saving 10 bytes, and using the proper tag.

Again, your comments should be contained inside your elements, else they could trip rendering bugs in IE.

<div class="clear">&nbsp;</div>

Code (markup):

WTF? A space in a div that is meant to clear...in the strangest place, why not just use:

<br class="clear" />

Code (markup):

Or better yet, plass the clear on the next element.


So you are in no real place to make arguments, you just back up the old argument that the only thing Dreamweaver does is teach people how not to code.

 

From my experience, if you're female you're less likely to be a good developer. Programming depends upon logic - if you don't have much logic, you won't have much luck doing anything logical (which is like 90% of everything in the world, but anyway...)

Let's make a scale:

--------- Tom Boy
-
-
-
-
-
-
--------- Girly Girl

The further up the scale you are the better your odds are. If you're a girly girl and logic is something that comes once a blue moon, don't waste your time, you will guaranteed crash and burn. If you're tom-boy then you have a good chance.

And DW sucks - design mode is unarguably useless for anyone even wanting the think they know ANYTHING about developing - which only leaves code mode - so all DW is is an extremely bloated, overpriced text editor.

EDIT: Wait, there is 1 good thing design mode is great for. Compare your HTML and CSS to sites that were made with design mode DW. If you see anything that's the same, you know you did something wrong

<b> is presentational and isn't the right tag to use. I have no idea which site you're referring to and can only see "name: lever" so not sure what else there is to mark up, however it shouldn't be marked up as "<strong>Name:</strong> Lever<br />", perhaps <dt>Name:</dt> <dd>Lever</dd> and the title is bolded using CSS... either way, shouldn't have a <b> or a <br />

 

For the <b> thing -, it is presentational, not emphasised so has no need to be strong. And <b> is considerably shorter than <span>.

I never even consider definition lists for this - and I don't know why, mainly cause I don't consider it a definition (though if you wanted to get technical...).

There is a reason <b> and <i> weren't stripped from the strict standard - they still have their uses, whereas <font> and <center> don't. Semantically, the thing is just bold text. It is not a definition and its not strong.

Thats just my style - I consider <i> and <b> presentational tags which are still appropriate to use. I still opt to use CSS if I was styling the entire parent element, but for short spans of text I'll use <b> or <i> or <address> etc, depending on what it is.

 

The only argument I have for the <b> is that making it bold IS presentational, as bolding "name" only makes it easier to read (it doesn't add any semantic meaning)

For just name:lever, I wouldn't use a dl; though, as there would obviously be other things in the list depending on what exactly I would sway to use one. Looks much better when the CSS is disabled also.

One of the good & bad things about HTML is that you can argue that something is pretty much anything (it could be marked up as a table - its tabular data (their name, date of birth etc)).

Anyway, getting off-topic, my main point is that if you don't have logic you'll suck at any programming/markup language, and DW sucks (except for finding out what not to do - its the best at that)

Oh yeah, and LOL about the 10 bytes thing - with that many validation errors and HTML that looks like that (it'd be safe to assume the images are unoptimised), saving 10 bytes is the least of the issues...

 

Oh, shut up

 

Well I do use it to help and have used DW for many years now, it's a valuable part of my toolbox as Notepad++ is a valuable part of your toolbox. One man's meat is another man's poison as they say. It's my choice and you've made yours. Whilst you tell people not to use DW I say make your choice and I don't diss Notepad++ either. I'm pretty fair whilst you are, as you admit, pretty arrogant.

It works for me, I shall do as I please and I have other tools to complement DW, it's just that DW is an all-round pretty good performer - I know it's limits as I know my own.

Thanks for the pointers blueparukia, admittedly the site of mine that those errors have popped up in needs sorting and I will, in time, get 'round to it. If you're digging in my blog, which is blogger based, and has been toyed with very many times over the years then fair enough but the vast majority of those errors are not DW generated and are inherent in the blogger template that I have been to quick and lazy to correct. I'm extremely busy and have very many things to do and sites to run let alone nit-pick with you.

I don't argue, I was merely trying to sweeten this thread by extracting some of the intense bitterness. At least my issues are only with some of my neglected code

Sorry this has gone way off topic, webaddiction As you can see, like life, it takes all sorts in this industry. I hope the tone of some these posts here doesn't put you off.

 

Please don't waste your money on Dreamweaver, there are so many better things you could buy with the amount of money that costs. Although it might be "harder" to start with, just use a plain text editor, such as Notepad++ and read some tutorials on how things work. That is the best way to learn.

 

And thats great of you, seriously it is. I respect you.

I am arrogant, but thats not really the source of my bias.

The source of bias against Dreamweaver is the fact that I work very long, and very hard doing what I do - churning out good code. At the moment I have 4 clients - two ecommerce jobs (designing one shopping cart solution, and altering another), a content management job and a miscellaneous PHP job. I do this while writing hobby scripts, developing a forum software and doing free recodes for people. I also manage a very active social life, I go down to the beach and downtown with my friends, out on the boat with my family etc. The icing on the cake is, since I'm 15 I still fit in 6 hours of school a day. Now I happily juggle eveything at once, because while the pay is this freaking great I never have to work a real job, but it really, really pisses me off when all my work - all the work I had to put in to learn stuff, all the time spent forgetting everything Dreamweaver 8 originally taught me - is virtually ignored and obliterated by people using Dreamweaver, FrontPage, NVU who, just because they have got a degree in using Dreamweaver think they are all crash hot. 2 days later they tell me they've f**ked up and that their site doesn't work in X browser, and I generally do a free recode for them, which they then screw over within 10 minutes.

Tell me, how.

Now that had me laughing, since I am assuming your are talking about my psycological state of mind. Trust me its quite sound I get frustrated, yes and I am an Australian teenager. What my tone comes across as angry, is actually casual banter.

 

Blueparukia, I know where you're coming from mate. DW does piss me off at times - it hangs, generates bloat, has all these whistles & bells that people use (thinking that they don't need to code - DW will do everything for them) it fails to FTP sometimes, skips files. So I do have Filezilla to back me up in the FTP dept and Topstyle for my CSS. They're all tools. Certain tools for certain jobs, mix 'n' match.

BUT it does allow me very quick and organised access to files and numerous sites in one interface (It's down to 20 now but I have had over 100 on my books at certain times in the past year) I constantly work in the code view with the split window to see how certain designs work, there are tools like my code snippets, validation (which you know I don't always use) I can knock up some very quick designs from the templates and hack them later, integration with Fireworks is handy... it works for me & I have the luxury of not paying for it as it's a tool my employer lays on at my request.

So from a management and workflow point of view it does me well. I did work just in notepad when I first started and now the DW code view is my new notepad, it just has the extra things I need.

It works for me.

I've no doubt you do excellent code, and I understand your frustrations at seeing bad code. I am certainly guilty of the latter, especially with hacking other code in templates etc that already exist and not 100% understanding every single nuance, even after 10 years in the game. I also know people who do the simplest of coding jobs and *still* get sloppy, so that's where I get pissed off but I can't come down on them like a ton of bricks - different folks react in different ways so I speak softly and carry a big stick.

But time is of the essence sometimes and letting scruffy code go is not good but occasionally a necessity of deadlines. As long as it just works at the front-end things get launched. Going back later for a cleanup is not great but a commercial reality for some of us - I won't go into all the other stuff I have to do

And yeah, I was having a dig mate but good on ya for having a laugh. I just wondered how many medals you guys got in the Olympics...

So ultimately should our friend here be using DW or not on her path as a designer? I said learn to code and if DW helps then use it. The choice is hers, only by testing it out will she know if it's the right tool for the job.

 

webaddiction,
most companies that hire a designer will require that a designer knows HTML and CSS inside and out. You need to start using photoshop and illustrator if you arent already doing so. you also should learn how to use dreamweaver or something similar as most companies use dreamweaver for regular html stuff.

as for a developer, in a company setting, only codes. asp, .net, php, js, etc. developers do not need any design knowledge or background. they just need to know hot to make apps and make them fast and secure.

now, if you can do both, you are a double threat and that is good. that way if you get hired as a designer somewhere, you can do some development too, and hopefully get a higher pay than you would as just a designer.

i myself worked at www.ittoolbox.com for two years, until about a month ago, as a designer, but, since i know php, i did the wiki re-design and most of the development. my primary job was to do design, but, i would get small asp projects thrown my way too. i know work as a php developer for an advertising company, www.larryjohnwright.com, but, i still do a little design for them too, and i do plenty of freelance design and development

if you are looking to get into freelance, then you need to learn design and development, if you arent, then learn all you can and see what you like more.

good luck in your ventures.

 

Very similar situation to you. I'm 17 and also live in Australia. I wish people would realize the bad practices and horrible code Dreamweaver produces and would learn to do things themselves.

 

We shall consider web development presence in web designing services.
But you can not feel any presence in Web design in Web Development services.