1stwebdesigner

Why Web Developers Should Learn Web Design

Posted: 24 Mar 2014 06:00 AM PDT

As a web developer, you are in charge of making the website do things. You are responsible for creating interactivity on the site, which may may include jQuery and Ajax validation forms, submitting forms to database, rollovers, sliding menus or many other aspects of the site that needs programming. But how about the website's design?

In my previous article Why Being a Web Designer Who Codes Is Way Cooler, I talked about why web designers should learn how to code and its benefits.

For this article, I encourage developers to learn proper web design process and how this will benefit them.

Why user experience is a big deal

Building a website nowadays requires more than just coding. Regardless how interactive your website is, website visitors might not have a good experience browsing it if the structure and design look awful. Thus, you lose the site's quality and visitors.

Web developers need to be more than code-generating groan people

With the modern web gradually developing, we are expecting much more out of our digital life- and the guys behind each website. Web developers are typically problem solvers. They most likely prefer to make the web pages work than make it look good and fascinating. But this might not work nowadays.

Take this as an example.

Have you tried hiring another developer for a project you are working on?

You went through the process of verifying that developer’s skills before hiring him or her. You informed that developer about all the details you want for the site project, including the design and features. That developer confirmed that he or she can do it on time.

When, in the end, the web developer presented the website, the site design still looks awful, though features are there.

A lot of clients have had this kind of experience. That’s why it is important that a web developer must also learn the design process to become more efficient and productive.

It doesn’t mean coding doesn’t cut in anymore but web developers should improve themselves beyond coding. Here’s why:

To become more responsible and completely human members of the team or company
It would be much better if a web developer can also create stunning websites
Plus, the web developer can also work on its interactivity at the same time

Why web developers should learn how to design

Being a web developer is cool but being a web developer that knows how to design stunning websites, is a way cooler. The following are the reasons why a web developer should learn how to design.

1. Improve your graphic design skills. Learning the design process will immerse you to different graphic design tools and design inspiration.

2. Improve your web design taste. If a web developer learns how to design, he or she can easily differentiate a stunning website from a terrible one. It's more about improving the aesthetic eye, that is, visual skills will become more refined and the web designs skills will naturally conform to your acclimated aesthetics.

3. Competitive web development. Learning the design process will help the web developer understand the business requirements more. He or she can be edgier because he or she can bring some excellent look and feel apart from the interactivity he or she brings to the table.

4. One man web development. If a web developer knows how to perform the task of a web designer and web developer, this allows that said web developer to earn more as he or she don’t need to get someone who can design for the project.

Some tips on how to learn web design

1. Look for inspiration. Checking great web design inspiration every now and then will eventually refine your web design taste.

Zero in on these sites to immerse oneself in quality design:

2. Try some web design tutorials. Practicing some tutorials about web design will improve your web design skills.

How about trying sites like:

3. Get some feedback. One of the best ways to learn is to start doing and getting feedback. The key is making sure that your web design is as simple, intuitive and easy to use, yet providing a very rich content and feature set.

I suggest using sites like:

Wrapping Up

There are so many advantages in learning coding and designing at the same time. In this article I showed you how both can help you achieve effective web development results. I want to emphasize that talent is not as much of a factor as most people would think. More often, interest is what people confuse as “talent.”

If you truly have an interest in something, you will be motivated to immerse yourself in it and practice it. Likewise, if you are a web developer, you can achieve creativity by learning and practicing it, which will later give you a lot of advantages in your career.