Web design and coding are interrelated subjects, though not distinct. While one can help the other, you can easily tend to get by with just one of the skills. A web designer for instance can do their whole job using tools like Dreamweaver and WordPress and never even look at a line of HTML or JavaScript, while someone who programs in C++ and makes computer games for a living is not necessarily going to need to build themselves a website. One does not predicate the other.
But if you are someone who is fortunate enough to be able to do both, then I’m here to highly recommend that you put your skills to full use. If you know how to program then there are some amazing things you can do to get more from your web design and this can help you to grow as a business and offer a much better overall product. Read on to discover some of the amazing uses that web design has for programmers.
Funky Features
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If you understand how to use PHP and JavaScript, then there are lots of little things you can add to your web design to make it more impressive and more appealing. A perfect example might be a drop down menu for instance, or perhaps you want to give your users the option to change the font size on your pages? That’s all possible and it can really make your site more impressive and more engaging.
Questionnaires and Forms
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You can also add entirely new attractions and functions to your site with those two coding languages. For instance, why not create a form on your site to get feedback from your visitors? Or better yet, how about having a questionnaire that will provide entertainment and information for them? For instance, if you have a website on fitness, then perhaps you could include a quiz to help them find their perfect gym? Or their ‘workout personality’. People love finding out about themselves, so these are always highly popular (and they also happen to be highly sharable).
Another option is to create useful tools for your website that the visitors can use productively. For instance, on a fitness website you might decide to include a calculator that calculates someone’s body mass index, or a tracker that allows them to look at how many calories they’ve consumed/burned in a day.
Development Tools
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Another thing you can do as a web designer, is to create tools that you yourself can use to make your job a whole lot easier. WordPress is incredibly powerful because it allows webmasters and bloggers to post more content with a single click of a button – by why not develop your own content management system that will do the same thing in a manner more suited to your specific needs? You can even create tools in other languages such as Java in order to give yourself entirely new ways of working. That might allow you for instance to edit your website using your smartphone, or it might help you to edit images faster.
Other Tools
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Likewise you can also create tools for other uses beyond your web design. For instance this might mean creating a script to help you with your web marketing, or just to keep all of your advertiser contact details organised so that you can look through them easily. Once you know how to program, you’ll find that ideas come to you and you find all kinds of ways you can automate your job and make it easier.
Specific Tasks
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Every now and then you will have a specific task that needs doing and that will be a one off. Still though, if it’s a very big job then you might find that you can write a program to do it for you quicker than you could do the job yourself. I once had to break up a dictionary (in .txt format) into lots of separate files for each word for instance. It would have taken years to do by hand, but I wrote a VB script for it and it was done in moments.
My advice if you can’t already program is to learn – the uses will present themselves to you afterwards. And if you can? Then my advice is to just use it.
This post has been contributed by John Miller, a software professional who works for Webfirm, a company providing online marketing services. He enjoys his job and he takes his family on road trips when he gets free from work.
