What it Takes to Build a Website: Designer and Developer Needs

As previously discussed in the article ‘Keys for choosing the right web designer’, you have put together a detailed web site plan before presenting it to your chosen designer. This includes the layout, colour scheme, number of pages and the kind of information contained within your site. Of course whoever you assigned to the job, needs the right tools and information in order to successfully build and implement your future site.

Below we will look at what basic development tools should be available to both designers and developers in order to build your chosen site. The difference between the two is also discussed in the previous article, the former being focussed on the look of your site with the latter worrying about the functionality and programming aspects.

First, a designer will need the plan you prepared in order to understand how you want your site to look. The designer can then discuss how feasible your intended plan is, or if it is possible to implement exactly what you have in mind.

Some professional designers use the following tools but many others are available:

Dreamweaver CS3 – An application used for developing web pages, by Adobe. It includes many features and can integrate various other Adobe components for a complete designer environment, such as Fireworks, Photoshop or others. This software has both a visual and a code editor.

JASC Paint Shop Pro – This application ensures that you can edit the images which will be on your web site, along with cropping, filter effects and many other features.

Swish – If you’d like your site to look cool and modern, you can ask the designer to use swish. It allows your site to use images, audio and animations smoothly.

Knowledge of CSS – Cascading Style Sheets is code used to define the appearance of your site (i.e. colour scheme, layout) and some designers choose to implement this in their chosen design.

Sometimes your designer can also develop your site, or program it. You can however hire a separate programmer if you wish, which will probably result in a more accurate and efficient job.

These are some of the skills which may help a developer in designing a website. Not all are needed however and no single developer needs to know all these languages or possess all these skill, as web development varies greatly and offers many different possibilities.

C sharp and Visual Basic – Both languages are used in the ASP.NET environment and therefore it can help if a developer can program in one of the two languages, although there are many other options available.

Java and Derivates – Java and derived languages (Jython, Jruby) are used to execute applets or server side technology and they are important if you wish to integrate those aspects in your website.

HTML – Even though modern web sites use a mix of different languages, applications and integrated components, Hyper-text markup is still the basic programming language for building Web sites.

ASP.NET, database management and development – These skills are only important if your plan is to create a business based web site which stores a lot of information, such as user information for instance. Some developers can manage these aspects of the site, and ASP.NET is the ideal environment for those.

These are some ideas on requirements for developers and designers.