What Does a Website Designer Do? Designer vs Developer Explained

If you have never commissioned a website before, the job titles can be puzzling. Does a website designer just make things look nice? Do they write the code? What does a web developer do that a designer does not, and do you need to hire both? This guide explains what a website designer actually does, stage by stage, how the role differs from a web developer's, which one your project needs, and what to expect when you work with either.

What Is a Website Designer?

A website designer is the person responsible for how a website is organised, how it looks and how people use it. That covers the structure of the site and its pages, the layout of each page, the typography, colours and imagery, and the way everything behaves on a desktop screen, a tablet and a phone. The aim is a website that represents your business well and makes it easy for visitors to do what you want them to do, whether that is get in touch, book an appointment or buy something.

Some website designers stop at the design and pass their work to a web developer who builds it. Others, like us, do both. The difference matters a great deal for a startup with a fixed budget and a launch date, and we come back to it below.

What a Website Designer Does, Stage by Stage

Every designer works slightly differently, but a professional website project usually involves the following stages. Our guide to the website design process and timescales goes into each of them in more detail.

Understanding your business and your customers

Good design starts with questions, not pictures. A designer will want to know what your business does, who your customers are, what you want the website to achieve, what you like and dislike about your current site if you have one, and who your competitors are. This is also the stage where you share your own ideas; our guide on how to write a website design brief shows how to get them across without any design vocabulary.

Planning the structure and pages

Next the designer works out which pages the site needs, how they relate to each other and how visitors will move between them. This is sometimes called the site map or information architecture. Getting it right at this stage is far cheaper than reorganising a finished website.

Wireframes and layout

Wireframes are simple, unstyled sketches of each page showing where the headings, text, images, buttons and forms will sit. They let you agree the layout and the priority of information before anyone spends time on colours and fonts.

Visual design

This is the part most people picture. The designer applies your branding, chooses typography and colour, selects or commissions imagery and produces detailed visuals of the key pages. A good designer will explain the reasoning: why the call to action sits where it does, why the text is a certain size, why the page is laid out in that order. If you do not yet have a brand, a designer who also does logo and brand design can create one alongside the website.

Designing for mobile

Most visits to business websites now come from phones, so the designer will design how each page adapts to small screens, not just how it looks on a large monitor. Navigation, images, forms and tables all need rethinking for mobile.

Prototypes, feedback and revisions

You review the designs, give feedback and the designer refines them. Most projects include a set number of revision rounds. Nothing should be built until you have approved the visuals.

Building the website, or handing over to a developer

Once the designs are signed off they have to be turned into a working website. A designer who also develops will write the code themselves. Otherwise the designs are handed to a developer, and the designer may or may not stay involved to check that the build matches the design.

Search engine foundations, testing and launch

A designer should make sure the site has the technical basics that search engines expect: sensible page titles and descriptions, clean structure, fast loading, mobile friendliness and a site map. Before launch the website is tested on different browsers and devices, forms are checked, links are verified and performance is measured. The site is then moved from a test server to your live domain, and many designers offer hosting and support afterwards so that you have someone to call.

The Skills and Tools a Good Website Designer Needs

• Visual design: layout, typography, colour and imagery, and the judgement to use them with restraint.
• User experience: understanding how people read and navigate screens, and designing for them rather than for the designer's own taste.
• Technical understanding: knowing what can be built, what it will cost and how design decisions affect speed and accessibility.
• Communication: asking the right questions, explaining decisions clearly and managing feedback.
• Commercial awareness: recognising that the website exists to generate enquiries or sales, not to win design awards.

Most designers plan and design in applications such as Figma or Adobe XD, which produce clickable prototypes you can review in your browser. Those who build their own sites also work in code editors and with development frameworks rather than templates or page builders. You do not need to know anything about these tools, but it is reasonable to ask a designer what they use and why.

Website Designer vs Web Developer

"Web designer" and "web developer" are often used interchangeably, and some people use "web designer" to mean anyone who makes websites. They are different jobs with different skills. A web developer takes the designs and turns them into a working website by writing code: building the pages so they display correctly in every browser and on every device, making forms, menus and interactive elements work, connecting the site to databases and third-party services, setting up hosting, and making sure the whole thing is fast and secure. Developers also build functionality that has nothing to do with appearance, such as booking systems, member logins, payment processing, admin dashboards and integrations with other software.

The Specialist Roles You Might Come Across

Larger projects split these two jobs further. You may see job titles such as:

• UX designer (user experience): focuses on how a site is structured and how people move through it, often through research and testing.
• UI designer (user interface): focuses on the visual detail of screens, buttons, forms and components.
• Front-end developer: builds the part of the website visitors see and interact with, turning designs into responsive pages. See our front-end development service.
• Back-end developer: builds the servers, databases, logins and business logic behind the scenes. See our back-end development service.
• Full-stack developer: covers both front-end and back-end.

For most startup and small business websites you do not need to hire each of these separately. A good website designer covers UX and UI, and a full-stack developer covers front-end and back-end.

Which Do You Need?

How to Tell Which One You Are Talking To

Job titles are not regulated, and plenty of people describe themselves as web designers when they only customise templates, or as developers when they only design. A few questions will clear things up quickly:

• Do you write the code yourself? A designer who does not build will say so, and should be able to tell you who does.
• Can I see websites you have both designed and built? Ask for live sites, not screenshots, and ask which parts of each project were theirs.
• Who fixes it if something does not work after launch? If the answer involves a second supplier, find out how that relationship works and who you contact.
• Can you build a booking system, a members' area or an admin dashboard? Pure designers cannot, and template-based builders often cannot either.
• What happens to the design files and the code when the project ends? You should own both.

Our list of questions to ask a website designer covers these and fifteen more, with the answers you should expect.

The Handover Problem, and the Case for One Studio Doing Both

When design and development are done by different people, the designs have to be handed from one to the other. This is where many websites lose their quality. The designer specifies a particular spacing, a particular font weight, an animation or a layout that changes neatly on mobile; the developer, working from static images, interprets it differently or finds it awkward to build and quietly simplifies it. Sometimes the designer has designed something that is expensive or impractical to build, and nobody finds out until development is under way. Each of these problems is small on its own. Together they are the reason so many finished websites look like a slightly worse version of the design the client approved, and resolving them takes extra rounds of communication between two suppliers, with you in the middle paying for the time.

When the same people design and build a website, the handover disappears, and the benefits are practical:

• Consistency. The website that goes live matches the design you approved, because the designer is the one building it.
• Better decisions. Design choices are made with the build in mind, so nothing is designed that cannot be built well, and technical choices respect the design.
• Speed. No waiting for a second supplier to become available, and no time lost explaining designs to someone new.
• Cost. One quote, one project to manage and no duplicated effort. Hiring separately means each supplier bills for their own project management, revisions and clarification time.
• Accountability. If something does not work as designed, there is one team responsible for fixing it, not two pointing at each other.

For a startup, this is usually the difference between a website that launches on time and on budget and one that drifts. Our own startup website design prices cover design and development together, with websites from £2,400 and websites with an admin dashboard from £3,900, so there is nothing to add for the build.

What a Website Designer Usually Does Not Do

Unless it is agreed in your quote, do not assume a website designer will:

• Write the words for your pages. Copywriting is a separate skill and is usually quoted separately.
• Take photographs or produce video.
• Design your logo or brand identity, although many designers, including us, offer this as an additional service.
• Run ongoing search engine optimisation, advertising or social media.
• Register your domain name or set up your business email, although they will usually advise.
• Enter large amounts of content you supply after the site is built, unless content entry is part of the quote.

Good designers are clear about these boundaries up front. If something is important to you, ask for it to be included in the quote.

What to Expect, and What to Prepare

You should expect a clear process, a fixed price, a realistic timescale, regular updates and the chance to approve designs before anything is built. In return, a designer will need some things from you:

1. A description of your business, your customers and what the website needs to achieve.
2. Your logo and any existing brand guidelines, colours or fonts, or a note that you need these designed too.
3. Content: the text for each page, images, and details such as opening hours and contact information.
4. Examples of websites you like, and why.
5. Prompt feedback at each stage. Delays in feedback are the most common reason websites run late.
6. Access to your domain name and any existing website or hosting accounts when it is time to launch.

If you are launching a new business, our startup website checklist covers everything to have ready before the design starts.

How DigitalPod Combines Design and Development

At DigitalPod the people who design your website are also the people who build it. We take every project from the first conversation through planning, visual design, development, testing and launch, with nothing handed to a third party. With a design degree and more than 15 years of industry experience behind the studio, we have designed and built websites for startups, solicitors and professional firms, trades, recruitment companies and membership organisations, and we design logos and branding for startups that are beginning from nothing.

If you need the complete service, start with our startup web design service. If you already have designs and just need them built, our website development service covers that. For an idea of costs, see our guide to how much a website costs in the UK, or contact us to talk through your project.