What Does a Web Developer Do?

A web developer writes the code that makes a website or application work. A web designer decides what it should look like, how it should be laid out and how someone moves through it — before any of that code exists. They are related crafts with different training, different tools and different judgement, and they are routinely sold under one heading. Knowing which you need is worth more than any amount of comparing portfolios.

What Each One Actually Does

Front End and Back End

Within development the split matters, because it changes who you need.

• Front end is everything in the browser: the markup, the styling, the interaction, accessibility, and how fast it renders on a mid-range phone. A front-end developer turns a design into something real that behaves properly on every screen size and for someone using a keyboard or a screen reader.
• Back end is everything behind it: the database, the business logic, authentication and permissions, integrations with other systems, and the API the front end talks to. A back-end developer decides what happens after the form is submitted — and whether it can be trusted.
• Full stack means someone works across both. Genuinely useful on small and mid-sized projects. On large ones it usually means one of the two halves is weaker, which is fine as long as everyone knows which.
• DevOps or platform is the deployment, hosting, monitoring and security layer. On a small project the developer covers it; at scale it is a job of its own.

A brochure site with a contact form needs front-end skill and very little back end. A customer portal that shows live order status is mostly back end with a front end attached. Those are different hires.

What a Web Developer Does in a Normal Week

Since the job title tells you almost nothing, here is the actual shape of it. Perhaps a third of the time is writing new code. The rest divides between reading existing code to understand it before changing it, fixing things that broke for reasons nobody predicted, reviewing someone else’s work, and the unglamorous business of deployment, dependency updates and making the same thing work on a browser that disagrees.

Two implications worth drawing out, because they explain a lot about estimates. First, changing existing code is usually slower than writing new code, because understanding comes first — which is why “it is only a small change” is often wrong. Second, most of the cost of software is incurred after it is first built, which is why decisions that make code easy to read later are not fussiness.

Which One Do You Actually Need?

The two rows in the middle of that table are the ones people get wrong most often, and in opposite directions: paying a developer to fix a conversion problem, or paying a designer to fix a speed problem. Both produce a tidy invoice and no change in outcome.

And Where Graphic Design Fits

Graphic design and web design overlap and are not the same. A graphic designer works with composition, type and brand, usually for a fixed canvas — a page, a poster, an identity. Web design has to work at any width, on any device, for someone who may be using a keyboard, a screen reader or a poor connection, and every element has states: hover, focus, disabled, loading, error.

A strong graphic designer produces something beautiful. Whether it survives being built depends on whether they have designed for the web before — whether the type scale works at 390 pixels, whether the contrast passes, whether there is a design for the empty state and the error state. When a build goes slowly, this is very often why: the design was drawn rather than specified.

If you want both handled by one team that has to live with the result, that is what we do — see UK web development.

Frequently Asked Questions

What does a web developer do?

Writes and maintains the code that makes a website or application work. In a normal week that is roughly a third new code and the rest reading existing code before changing it, fixing unexpected breakages, reviewing others’ work, and handling deployment, dependency updates and browser differences.

What is the difference between a web designer and a web developer?

A designer decides what the site should look like and how someone moves through it, and produces wireframes, prototypes and specifications. A developer builds it in code and makes it work, perform and integrate. If you do not yet know what the site should be, you need design first; if you know and it does not exist, you need development.

What does a web designer do?

Decides layout, visual hierarchy, type, colour and the shape of the user journey, then specifies it well enough to be built — including the states people forget: hover, focus, loading, empty and error. On the web that also means designing for any screen width and for keyboard and screen-reader use.

What is the difference between front end and back end?

Front end is everything in the browser: markup, styling, interaction, accessibility and rendering speed. Back end is everything behind it: database, business logic, authentication, permissions and integrations. A brochure site is mostly front end; a customer portal is mostly back end with a front end attached.

Do I need a designer and a developer, or will one person do?

For a small site, one capable person often does both well. Past a certain complexity, wanting one person to cover both usually means accepting a compromise on one of them — which is fine if you choose which, and a problem if you discover it at the end.