An analogy can be drawn between building a website and building a house. Although we tend to think of sites as being built by a "web designer," they are actually a team effort.
Putting together a unique, engaging website requires a variety of design, content development and programming skills. On a small website, these skills will typically reside in a single designer or small design team. For a larger website, you may see specialists tackling different aspects of the project.
In this analogy, the bigger the house, the more trades with specializations are typically involved in the construction. But you may only have one or two people involved in putting together a pre-fabricated garden shed. In building a house, you might not want the plumber pulling the electrical wiring (codes might not be nuts about that either!) and you might not want the guy who is laying the roof shingles also doing the interior design specifications.
In the same way, your graphic designer may not be the same person who is coding the website or determining the most suitable framework. The size of the project will generally determine the degree of specialization, but some of the principal roles involved in crafting a website can be:
- Graphic Design
- Content Writing
- Programming and Design Implementation
- Search Engine Optimization
- Project Management
- Database Design
- Hardware Requirements (hosting servers and website traffic capacities)
- Usability Testing
Just as building a house requires tradespeople, you also have building material suppliers. A house will only have top value on the market if quality materials are used.
To push the analogy further, a website needs IP suppliers if it is going to be successful. A website that truly represents the company or organization will have considered input from marketing, sales, fulfillment (if the business sells product), the service department, customer service and, of course, management. For building a website, these are the intellectual property suppliers. This internal part of the website team has to provide the high-quality raw material for building a website in order for it to achieve its full potential.
Whether you have a small, brochure website or a large website with thousands of pages, the same skills will go into building the site. The degree of specialization in task assignments, however, will vary depending on the size of the website, if for no other reason than to divide up the tasks and to take advantage of the synergy available from a creative team working together towards a common goal.
