What Does a Web Designer do?

The world of web development is complicated and can be confusing for untrained people. There are lots of different builders and hosting platforms. And once you have made all those decisions, you need a plan for long-term maintenance. These factors become even more incoherent when you try to figure out how to tailor your site toward your customer base. But every day, professionals design sites for companies that draw users in and convince them to buy products. So what does a web designer do?

The short answer is web developers connect users to companies who want to use the internet like a store. These programmers are the people who work to make sure you have something to do with that wifi! Today we will give you a top-to-bottom outline of a web design work and how they make beautiful landing pages! We cover the basics like front and back-end builders, hosting, link building, and so much more! Let’s start by discussing designers’ main web development tools and builders!

Front End vs. Back End

The easiest way to understand these two camps is to distinguish what users see. The client-side is things a user will notice or be able to click. Includes graphics, the buttons, and anything else that comes up when you click the link. But what does a web designer do for these different jobs? Client-side developments come from front-end builders training in fields like graphic design. Conversely, back-end builders are more robust in areas like coding and have experience with programming for connectivity-based languages.

Back-end development is unique because while people don’t see it, the effects are often more impactful. Programmers in this field use Languages like Java, C#, and python to connect various landing pages and elements. After they have the bare bones of a site, these teams begin optimizing and refining your website to ensure it’s fast and easy to use. The catch is making sure new optimizations don’t harm your user experience. Back-end coders spend a lot of time reducing load times and optimizing user functions.

Hosting

A host server houses the data which makes up your website. Host platforms can be hugely influential to how your site runs. Popular choices include Amazon, Hostinger, and Bluehost; Bluehost works great for new WordPress development, but Amazon is the best value overall. These aren’t the only services in the game, though! hundreds of smaller companies host websites. It’s also possible to host for yourself, but the costs of servers are expensive, and these days cloud-based hosting is standard.

Hosts are also responsible for the maintenance and security of these servers. This upkeep includes protection from physical threats like water damage or other corrupting forces and data maintenance like firewall upkeep. All this work ensures you can reach your secure website anywhere in the world! But now, you need to link all that data with landing pages!

Link Building

Now that you know how to make landing pages and where they live, we need to talk about links. Any time you go to a new part of a website, a link takes you there. These are essentially the only way people can find your pages, so web designers spend lots of time ensuring they are all connected. We call this process link building. A good web designer’s work will feel like a roller coaster with marked progression through a clear linear path. These websites connect with pages that lead to clearly defined destinations. But they don’t all have to be your site!

There are thousands of other websites, so link building can also take place externally! You can do this by providing a utility other designers can’t afford or don’t want to make, like a calculator or other open source tools. Or you could even do collaborative work that lives on both sites. But how are links prioritized?

Keywords and SEO

Search engines are the most common way people find sites, and optimization is an easy way to get their attention. Services like Google are open about ranking sites, so following these steps can help give your site exposure. In Web Design, we call this SEO, and it’s an ongoing process. SEO can only optimize around specific goals, and that’s where keywords come in.

Keywords are the direct search you want to rank. They can be short phrases or whole sentences, which will dramatically influence your optimization tools. These tags can also help you target people in particular areas. Using location tagging, web designers can make your website more appealing and familiar wherever you do business. After you have your target keywords, use the optimization practices we discussed to outshine other websites.