Chapter 2
In This Chapter
Discovering how the web developer role has splintered
Exploring front-end jobs
Getting to know other contributors
Understanding why Photoshop is (still) key to web development
There are almost as many ways into web development as there are people with web development jobs. However, there are a few common elements among different “tribes” in web development that provide a kind of ladder for working your way into a career, and then making your way in the web development world.
An initial screen is what “bucket” of related areas your talents and interests fall into. If your skill is in making things look good, you are somewhere in the artistic and graphics areas. The key job title here is visual designer. In this chapter, we explain the difference, and more.
Web development jobs are thought of as technical, but the “looking good” area is really at the core of web development versus other career paths. The key job title here is visual designer, although people doing this work can be called graphic designers, web designers, and other titles as well. (The old, very broad term webmaster is still used sometimes.)
The first priority for a visual designer is creating a look and feel to the site. To do this, the designer uses a pretty standard toolkit — either tools from the Adobe suite, including Photoshop, Illustrator, and Designer, or alternatives such as GIMP for graphics. The designer will have a good understanding of color theory and how color works across digital platforms, as well as in print and other static media.
The initial goal for getting a website design approved is that a CEO, managing director, company president, marketing director, startup founder, or other leader likes the look and feels comfortable cruising around the site. These people typically weigh in at two stages in a project — and they are part of the first reason why these jobs are so difficult.
That’s because the visual designer — and, with that person, the entire web development team — are at the mercy of the gut feel of people in upper management who often aren’t that knowledgeable about any aspect of the project: what its goals are, who’s working on it, how much effort has already occurred, how much more work has to be done in so little time, and so on.
They often are also lacking knowledge in branding, visual design (what’s possible visually on the web), technical standards (what’s possible technically on the web), or the needs of the user base. Yes, it’s common enough that a key decision-maker has some part of the relevant skill set and knowledge base; it’s rare indeed that they have most or all of it.
Yet senior managers have to approve website designs based on scanty information. They are being asked to make an important decision, perhaps even a bet-the-company decision in some cases, on their gut. So a gut check, rather than an informed decision, is what you’re likely to get.
And, you’re likely to go through two approval cycles: once near the beginning of the project, when you need a signature or verbal approval to get the project going; and once near the end, when you’re looking for a sign-off for launch. This can be an anxiety-producing process, with lots of tweaks, or even a significant reset in the project.
In addition to a desire to make things look good, and nerves of steel, the visual designer also needs good technical skills. That’s because website publishing demands that things look good, while making it very hard to actually carry that off consistently across different devices, screen sizes, and browsers.
Every visual designer needs to understand the technical barriers well enough to optimize his or her design work for what’s actually possible. The best visual designers understand the technology well enough to actually implement the design, or lead the implementation of the design, themselves.
This is the hottest ticket in web development — the single individual who has mastered visual design and enough coding skills to carry the whole project forward alone, or to lead a project as the highly skilled professional at the top of two complementary teams.
The second major bucket after artistic/graphical skills for web designers is, of course, technical skills. This is the ability to work in various kinds of coding languages to Get. Things. Done. The main languages used are HyperText Markup Language (HTML), Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), and JavaScript.
These three coding standards (they aren’t quite programming languages) are the core of the ability to make websites look great and appear to a typical user as easy to use. They also help you get desired results from a web page, such as visits to a particular page, signups for an event, sales of a product, or views of a video. In addition to being the major secondary skills for most visual designers, this is also the core skill set of most web developers who are expressly technical.
In addition to these “front-facing” technical capabilities, which affect things that users see and click or tap, there are back-end software development jobs as well. These typically use languages such as Python and SQL to manage the interface between users visiting a website and one or more databases which are accessed for content, and updated with user-generated information as a result.
Finally, there are many additional categories, including
Each of these categories is discussed in some detail in this chapter. Study the categories carefully to see where you might best fit in.
The lead role in web development is the role of visual designer. A visual designer has overall responsibility for the look, feel, and functionality of the website.
The reason for this somewhat of an historical accident. An organization’s website is often the most important presentation of that organization to the world, and the idea that website creation usually needs to be led by someone with a graphics and artistic background — rather than, say, a technical person, a marketing manager, a general businessperson, or even a lawyer — is controversial, with good reason.
For many organizations, the stakes are even higher because their websites generate, or support, part or all of their revenues and profits. Website storefronts are substantial cash generators for many companies, the main customer service and support location for others, and the whole ball of wax for quite a few — handling all aspects of customer interaction. In these cases, there’s even more reason for having the web effort led by a general business manager of some sort. Still, the justification for having a strong design background before you take on top web development jobs is quite strong.
Visual designers almost always have some formal education in art and design, and often have broad, interesting backgrounds, including work as painters, sculptors, filmmakers, print designers, or artists who work in advertising. Web design is very friendly to people who have a strong academic background and strong real-world experience outside the web world.
Even the most artistic visual designer, though, is going to be expected to know her stuff technically — what is and isn’t possible online; how different devices display page layouts, content, and multimedia; and how to work productively with people who put their technical hat before their designer hat, or who don’t wear a designer hat at all.
At best, the visual designer is himself a technical person; he can mock up a great design in Photoshop, tweak it until the budget holders involved are happy, and then implement a working site in a matter of weeks or, for large sites, a few months.
Check the next job area description, front-end developer, for a list of skills that any talented visual designer would be well served to master, or at least become competent in, alongside design.
Some visual designers go the other way, though. They leave the technical implementation completely to others and take on a range of projects beyond the website. A visual designer’s work can grow to include apps, print, signs, shirts, and marketing stuff. In that case, the visual designer might be referred to simply as a designer.
You will know that you’re a potential visual designer if you have an arts background, love making things look great, care deeply about making them work well, and have a strong technical bent.
A front-end developer is the logical complement to a visual designer. (When people use the broader term web designer, they are usually looking for someone who can do most of the work in both categories.) A front-end developer can take a visual developer’s Photoshop mock-up of a web page and make it appear onscreen as part of a website.
There are three terms that you need to know really well for any kind of web development work, plus one that is nearly as vital in many organizations, which will be part of the meat and potatoes of your daily work if you become a front-end developer:
Web designers used to be able to make a very good living indeed by being expert in the various versions of HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and mainstream Windows and Macintosh web browsers as standards grew steadily more capable and complex and as browsers grew ever more capable — and, for a while, inconsistent. Browsers are much more standardized today; now the challenge of making websites work across personal computer browsers is less, but the rise of smartphones and tablets, which mostly have smaller screens than personal computers, has replaced the old standards challenge with new challenges driven by the proliferation of different devices.
If you specialize in front-end development, you might come to be referred to as a front-end engineer. You could also become a JavaScript developer or JavaScript engineer. You could become known for your expertise in creating and managing libraries of CSS style sheets as well. The room for growth and development is endless.
What distinguishes front-end developers from traditional software developers can include an interest in working with people and not just computers; fascination with the web and its possibilities; and really, really, really liking rapid change — change in the technologies in use, change in projects, change in employers, and often all three at once.
Front-end developers usually study software development in school, but they can also be musicians, artists, writers, scientists, or come from almost any background. Demand for these skills is so high that those who have the right mindset and are willing to apply themselves can quickly find themselves working right alongside people with CS (computer science) degrees from prestigious universities.
Usability people make sure that websites work to specification, and then they try to improve the design to make it easy, obvious — almost inescapable — to go deeper and deeper into a website, until you buy something, download a white paper, watch a cat video, or whatever the site’s developers want you to do. They tend to work using web design tools such as the Dreamweaver suite, although they will often know a smattering or more of the technologies described previously.
Usability people come from a wide variety of backgrounds. We’ve known teachers, writers, and actors who have moved into usability work successfully. Many usability people work as consultants because their skills are most needed at certain key points in a project.
Usability-related titles include
The term web developer can mean two things: any professional on a web development team, including the graphics-oriented and usability people; or only the more technically based people. In this section, we use the more technically oriented definition.
A web developer is a full-time software developer who usually works in web-friendly programming languages such as Python, Ruby, PHP, and so on. A web developer will usually be good with JavaScript, good at database work, and be able to get tasks done in HTML and CSS.
The web developer doesn’t need to have any artistic or design background, although of course every web professional will do well to understand the outlines of, and have respect for, every role in the overall effort.
Many web development roles are extremely demanding. On a big web development project, all the pieces are moving at once, and a web developer has to do useful work that can adapt to changes in the front end, the back end, the project goals, and anything else you can imagine. This extends to the sudden cancellation of website features or entire projects — and just as suddenly reviving them months or years later.
The web developer title is a big umbrella that can include front-end developers and back-end developers. Used properly, it really refers to the middle and toward the back end of a project. Web developers definitely need to know what’s going on within the user-facing website project, but their role is to work with the front-end developers to receive and send information from databases and other organizational resources. They aren’t likely to directly concern themselves with the user interface, for instance.
Web developers who aren’t front-end specialists tend to be a bit less concerned with the user’s experience and more concerned with traditional CS concerns like security and structure. A good web developer will make the lives of back-end developers pretty easy.
We are not treating back-end developers as “web developers” for the purpose of this book. Back-end developers spend their time in traditional programming languages like C or C++ and doing database programming in languages like SQL. These developers often work on web-related projects, but their work is informed by, rather than determined by, the needs of any one web development project.
Front-end roles are focused on the look and feel that the user encounters. There are additional roles that are not back-end jobs (the site’s underpinnings and technical interaction with websites), but that are somewhat separate from the front end’s focus on what exactly a user sees and interacts with.
Given that one of us (Bud Smith) is a professional web content developer, let us say right here and now that this is one of the most underrated and misunderstood roles in web development or, really, any sphere of human endeavor, ever. Content professionals provide the words, images, and multimedia assets that people visit a website to experience in the first place.
Writing for the web is different than any other kind of writing. People who are reading online — which is “like staring into a light bulb,” as some have described it — get tired more easily and are able to give less attention to detail than traditional print readers.
So fewer, more powerful, more action-oriented words are needed to get the point across quickly and move on. Bulleted lists and lots of headers give variety to the flow of text and help the reader find key facts and key points.
Images and multimedia for online are specialty areas as well. (Or, perhaps, they should be, as a lot of not-very-suitable stuff gets put up online.) Web video is, in its own right, a whole new area of human endeavor, and one that’s attracting a lot of talent — including Hollywood writers, producers, and stars — to try their hand in a new medium.
Most web content professionals have backgrounds in a given area before the web. Web writers are well-suited to this work if their previous background includes advertising or marketing writing and a strong technical grounding, which is a rare combination indeed. Writers tend to have some formal education in writing, either as the focus of their bachelor’s degree, or from a related area such as history.
Content written for the web usually goes into a content management system (CMS), where it can be edited, moved around, displayed, tallied, reused, and ultimately disposed of. There are several major CMSs, such as Drupal, Joomla!, and CushyCMS (we aren’t kidding). Each has its own advocates and fans. Writers sometimes move into more or less technical roles as CMS experts.
As with artistic assets, writing assets need managing. There is a whole industry around writing small chunks of easy-to-translate, easy-to-reuse content, and then combining the chunks for different purposes. The chunks are also easier to translate and reuse than long blocks of text. There’s specialist work here for writers, content management professionals, translators, and others.
A product manager, like a writer, is an unusual beast. Product managers are marketing managers who are responsible for getting a product — in this case, a website — to market. Like writers, many product managers are former technical professionals who prefer to work in areas where they have, to a certain extent, an outsider’s view of the project.
Product managers can be very strong — mini-CEOs, with budget responsibility and hiring and firing power or influence — or more like internal consultants who suggest, but can’t require, user-friendly and sales-friendly ways of doing things. The skilled product manager can thrive across a wide range of job attributes as well as a wide range of technical challenges.
Although the roles are often confused, a project manager is different than a product manager. Project managers make the trains run on time. They help set the schedule, secure resources, and ensure that milestones are met. Project managers are sometimes also the boss of a project, but they are more often working at the middle level.
An evangelist is a specialized role which includes part of a product manager’s job. An evangelist talks to people outside the project, selling the vision for the site to get people ready for it, and gathering information to help the project team meet customers’ needs better. (Unlike in usability, money talks when an evangelist determines where to spend her time.)
Look for a product manager role if you have a chance to get a strong degree in business or marketing, or if you work in almost any other web development role and have strong business or people skills. If you have that same background, but are more detail-oriented than people-oriented, consider project management. And if you have great people skills, but don’t yet have the business background for product management, try evangelism, brothers and sisters.