Digant Shah

Tech Lead, Web & Software Development

Web Design

10 Reasons Web Developers Should Learn Web Designing

As a professional web developer, you are only responsible for website development. Right? You may only care about developing interactivity on the website like submitting forms to the database, jQuery and Ajax validation forms, sliding menus, rollovers and many other features of the website, which requires programming skills.
Now, what about designing part? Have you thought about learning web designing anytime as a web programmer? No? Well, in this blog I would like to encourage web developers to learn web designing skills. It is because learning designing skills may benefit them in a good deal in the long run.

Let’s have a look at why web developers or web programmers should learn web designing skills and how it can benefit them.

User Experience Considered as a Leading Thing

These days, developing a high-end website needs a lot more than just coding. Instead of considering how interactive your website is, website visitors may expect to have a good experience.
Therefore, if you have ignored the design of website and overall structure, it may look bad. Hence, you can lose website traffic considerably as well as ranking in bonus.

Does a web developer needs to do more than just code generating?

With rapid changes in web development technologies in the modern era, web developers should think their role out of traditional programming role.
By nature, the web developers are problem solvers, so they mainly opt to make the web pages, just working, instead of trying to make web pages attractive and capable of delivering excellent results. Unfortunately, just coding or programming role may not appropriate these days.

Let’s take an example

Suppose you are a client and opt for developing a medium to big size website. Now, you are going to hire a team of web programmers or web developers with programming skills only.
Naturally, they web programmers hardly accustomed to web designing and graphic designing tools. If they are, it is expected they never match the skills to the seasoned web designers who have spent a considerable amount of time and efforts to acquire expertise.
Therefore, you need to hire another team or a web designer with graphics and other designing expertise at the professional level. However, it is good to hire two separate entities, web programmer/s, and web designer/s, for a medium to a big project, but what about small and medium projects with budgetary constraints?
Naturally, you might be looking for a web developer or a small team of web programmers with both skills, programming, and designing. Thus, you can save time, money, and resources to obtain website or web application within your budget as well as before deadline to sustain the fiercely competitive market.
Moreover, there are some additional advantages for that a developer should go beyond coding and enhance their web designing skills:

  • In order to become more professional and responsible member of the team or a company
  • If a professional web developer creates an attractive website, it may go in favor of web developer to get more projects or big applauds from clients or company where developer is working
  • When a developer working on both tasks, designing and programming, it may not leave any room for dispute or gaps in collaboration/communication

Reasons Why a Professional Developer Should Learn How to Design

As we all know that being a web developer is a great thing, but if being a web developer, who knows how to design eye-catchy website, it is really a very great thing. Have a look at the reasons why a web developer should learn to design:

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Boost Attractiveness of Your Website

A web developer can easily distinguish a beautiful website from a horrible one only when the developer has the knack to judge the web design. Logically, it is only possible when a web developer knows designing and have spent the time of a number of designing projects in real life.
Therefore, a web developer, with an eye as visual expertise can boost the aesthetics of website more. Thus, the website may become more refined.
Moreover, the web designing skills can lead web developers to deviate acclimatize aesthetics during the web development process.

Can Incorporate Material Design Trends

Material design is based on geometric shapes, brings depth and realism to your site. Therefore, if a web programmer has expertise in web designing using material design, it would be great for a project.
Moreover, material designing involves more code and less designing work, so it makes life easy for a programmer.

Can Make Responsive Web Design

Mobile friendliness for a website or web application is compulsory to attract a vast audience of mobile users and gaining ranking in SERP. Therefore, if a web developer is capable of responsive web designing and coding accordingly, it makes big differences for a client with limited budget and timeline.

Can Make Single Page Parallax Website

Touch screen design favors infinite scrolling, so the latest web design trends favor single page website with tons of multimedia content. That visually eliminates like menus and some navigational architects.
For a web designer and programmer, it is challenging to bring everything on a single page and gives the best UX as well as usability. If a web programmer can acquire such skills, it proves cost-effective to hire the web developer with designing and programming flairs.

Can Bring Unique Images

Yesterday, it was stock photos rocking on the web, but today unique and customized images are working on the web. It needs some graphic designing and web designing skills to bring unique multimedia content including images, videos, and animations on your website.
Thus, it is mandatory for a web programmer to have designing skills on hand to bring uniqueness.

Can Bring Data Visualization

Today data and analytics is becoming more significant than ever. Therefore, data presentation skills such as tabulation, graphs, charts, and other visual presentation skills can make much difference in aesthetics, comprehensions, and UX of your website.
If a web developer can learn these during web designing learning process, your website might have great appeal and excellent user experiences across the devices.

Can Incorporate Minimalistic Web Design Trends

In 2017, minimalism has taken a whole new level, and ‘card’ concept is rocking. Technically, cards are entry points on the website and act as doorways to gain details regarding the content presented on the card.
Custom photos and designs are content on the card to suggest a topic visually and entice website visitors to click to engage further. Images and multimedia content including videos are best ways to make effective presentations with consumption of less space.

Can Bring Next Generation Web Development Trends

Today many upcoming technologies are under process to give new dimensions to the web development industry. For instance,

  • The progressive web app development using manifest, service workers, and shell architecture technologies
  • Static website development using static web page generators to bring dynamism with the best performance
  • Responsive web development for desktops, laptops, smartphones, tablets, and some wearable devices

Therefore, web programmers must learn the modern HTML, CSS, and scripting technologies (JavaScript, CSS Media Queries, jQuery…), tools, and techniques to deal with upcoming trends in 2017.

Can Bring Conversational UI

The latest trends suggest the more usage of conversational user interfaces such as chats, IM, and other natural language interfaces to interact with companies, services, and bots.
Therefore, web developers with designing skills can incorporate these conversational UI elements with their websites and web applications easily.

Can Bring High-performance

People and search engines may find hungry more for high-performance. Loading speed of your website is the first target among the key performance parameters to hit.
Therefore, web programmers must learn the image optimization, GIF-like lightweight animation development, and other smart UI element designing techniques to satisfy website visitors as well as bots to rank your website and bring good conversion rate with high ROI.

Hire dedicated team for your next web development project.

3 Simple Tips on How to Learn Web Design

Look for Motivation: You can check-out wonderful web design and its trends for motivation, and ultimately you can refine your web design taste.
Try-out Some Web Design Tutorials: You should also practice some of the tutorials about web design as it will enhance your web design skills and expertise.
Get Some Feedback: The best way to learn is to begin doing and getting feedback. The main thing is to ensure that your web design is easy-to-use and simple, offering a rich content and feature set.

Last Thoughts

Learning web designing is extremely important for web developers as they can get a lot of benefits by learning web designing. Thus, every web developer should learn web designing as it can benefit them in many ways.
Stay connected with us to get more information on web designing, and its new trends that you can adopt. Moreover, you can also hire a professional web developer to discuss your project requirements.