As a web developer, nothing irks me more than business folks dictating how a product should work when they’re not familiar with the technology behind it and don’t bother to get feedback on their ideas. They will come up with impossible ideas or things that are really not worth the time to implement. I would assume this same thing tends to happen to the lowly html coder who receives designs from a someone that doesn’t know html, css, or javascript.

And this knowledge should not have to interfere with the design results, I mean it should not limit the design (like Dean just mentioned). While the designsketches may look great while they’re still in Photoshop, they’ll likely fall apart once they’re marked up if you have no knowledge on the subject. That was true 15 years ago, and remains true now. So knowing up-front how you will build what you’ve designed will not be decremental to your design, but will in fact refine it, make it tick.

When I start a website, I always start from the design perspective: what works for this site and its objectives. Only after that I screen it for potential markup and coding problems. To that end, I would even go so far as to say that a web designer needs a basic understanding of programming as well, especially in the case of dynamic content (is there a website that’s not dynamic these days?). And true, you might have to revise a design due to coding hazards or other technical limitations (i.e. IE), but does that mean that the design gets compromised?

There are lots of limitations facing us. But that’s what makes web design so darn interesting, doesn’t it?

P.S.: If you should be so lucky that you get to work wit a great implementation team like I have in the past, then you would do them a great pleasure if you would know your stuff!

The advantage of having a designer AND a coder is that they know their part better and each can provide that knowledge and use it to push the other harder. (“Hey, did you know you can …?” Yeah? Well, maybe we can us it to…, or I wonder if you could…?”) There’s also time for each to think through the problem. If they work well together, they can come up with a better solution than one person alone. Or don’t people work like that?

Also, no one’s commented that Rik transposing his “their” and “there”s in his opening post; we shouldn’t leave the copywriters out of this process, either. It’s all about getting the point across.

For a designer, busting headlong into PHP is rarely inspiring, and less often is it productive. I feel that in many cases things like PHP, Content Management and the building of more complex functionality is left to a designer who may not understand the power of the language they are dealing with. Designers can run through a tutorial or use a library like jQuery to add more complex code too, but anything more is going to take experience and expertise.

Likewise I have seen sites designed by developers and the problem is reversed. Sure they can make it work, and sure the coding is great, but visually they tend to leave a lot to be desired. Again this is due to a lack of understanding from the developer about the power of the medium they are dealing with.

The two jobs were always intended to go hand in hand, and it can work. The designer should be able to design, code the front of the site, and concern themselves with any issues that involve user experiences. Any functionality such as complex back end coding, scripting languages or systems should be dealt with by a proper developer.

I think web designer and web developers like to have the “all in one” approach as their customers will get their website with one person/company. However I’d like to see more developer/designer teams springing up to give the clients better and more realized solutions by drawing on the expertise of both.

A great (WEB) designer must know both design and… basic coding.