Freelance vs. In-house Developers: What to Choose for Your Project?
Many startups face the problem of choosing between freelance vs. in-house developers, sooner or later. You too should know the difference between them.
It’s no surprise that people not infvolved in web development tend to confuse these two professions. Both of them work on the same task: roughly, to establish interaction between users and websites.
An uneducated customer makes funny mistakes sometimes. They ask a web developer things like:
After tormenting a front end developer, such a customer addresses a web designer:
There is nothing wrong with that (when it happens for the first time). After all, how many people not related to digital technologies clearly tell what is a web designer vs. a web developer? To fix it, let’s take a closer look at what front-end developers and web designers do.
So, what is front-end development, exactly? It is a field of web development that implies bringing the concepts developed by a web designer to life. Simply put, a front-end developer reanimates the layouts and overall appearance of a website. Buttons get clickable and animated. Chat windows pop up or fold. Sliders slide, animations launch and stop, and so on.
I.e., a front-end developer enables the interaction between users and the website.
The difference between designer and developer can be described in just one sentence. Front-end development is about how a website is ticking, while web design is about what is ticking.
Why do we use the Internet? Well, along with posting kitties on social media, we need the Internet to search for all kinds of information. And we usually do it by interacting with websites: clicking here, dragging there, inserting search requests, chatting with support services, etc.
Such interaction occurs with the help of user web interfaces. Generally speaking, these are means allowing us to navigate around a website retrieving or inputting info. And it is a web designer who prototypes user web interfaces.
Contrary to popular opinion, web designers do not just decorate websites (although it’s a part of the job as well). A brief web designer definition sounds like this: it is a person, whose main task is to define the logic behind a website’s structure and think of the ways to present important and relevant information most efficiently.
– Can’t find the “Contact us” button?
– Have to wade through multiple screen-wide pop-ups?
– Keep getting the “incorrect format” message when entering your credentials?
A good web designer should not allow things like that to happen to users.
When creating designs for future websites, web designers should consider technical limitations that may occur during the development process. Not everything a designer conceptualizes can be implemented by means of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Or, if it can, it may also increase the website’s loading time and make it laggy.
If a web designer is unfamiliar with markup languages, it may obstruct the development process and cause a series of redesigns.
So yes, a web designer should know the HTML/CSS/JavaScript, at least on a fundamental level.
On the other hand, front-end developers can make some use of knowing Photoshop or Sketch/Illustrator, but they do not need web designing skills to do their job.
“Front end developer vs web designer” is a vast topic, so there could be a whole page of plain text here. But, we thought a brief table would work better, so enjoy.
We hope our article helped you figure out the difference between a front-end developer and a web designer. If you already have a website, the chances are that you need a front-end developer rather than a web designer. When an internet page is up and running, web designers have little to do with it, while a developer will most likely have a bunch of technical tasks to work on.
The complexity of these tasks varies drastically. Adding or removing buttons will obviously cost less than writing WordPress plugins and optimizing a website for mobile platforms.
The good news is that our front-end developers do it all. Lemon.io tests each freelancer for coding skills, knowledge of the principles on which PHP and JavaScript frameworks are built, and the ability to perform all kinds of tasks using this expertise.
So, when you come to Lemon.io for a front-end developer, you get to hire only the best ones. In fact, let’s do it right now.
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