Business Oriented Design – A Redefinition of the Web Designer

The internet is rapidly changing and designers are going to have to quickly adapt to the business-centric visual evolution. It is a buzz-word world we live in and specializing in it all is going to limit our ability to truly excel.

There has been much debate in the past several years around that very thin, very grey line between back-end programmers and front-end designers. Who does what and at what point do they start doing it? Not so long ago, the debate used to be between designers and coders – those who only play in PhotoShop versus those who only play in DreamWeaver (anything beyond pure HTML was for the techies). Those days have passed us; it is now extremely rare to find a job description that includes only visual design where coding is not required. Now if you are stuck in the last century and don’t understand why anyone would suggest merging any of these skill-sets together, you should probably stop reading now. I’m actually surprised you made it this far, “business-oriented’ in the title should have scared you off.

Emerging technologies such as CSS, ActionScript, JavaScript, XML, DOM-Scripting and their counterparts, AJAX, XSL, XSLT have all made that thin line much thinner and much blurrier. As many of you try and cautiously walk that thin blurry line – it can feel like taking a sobriety test after an all night kegger. We are all dangerously close to falling over, losing it all and waking up with the worst hang-over of all time.

I intend to suggest that the web designer of the future will become more business oriented than technologically savvy. That thin hard-to-see line is going to be distinguished and defined by the same principles that make it so questionable; the visual. Forget AJAX and XML. The new buzzwords for designers are emphatically: Information Architecture, Search Engine Optimization, Usability Best Practices, and Accessibility, to name a few.

The line between design and development should be drawn at interaction. That is to say once the user request interaction with the site or vice versa – design stops and development begins. Obviously there are many exceptions to such a bold statement; the one exception I will touch on is interaction that is solely for aesthetic presence (style switcher, tab switcher, etc.). It is the front-end visual elements that the designer should be focusing on. More specifically, those elements which primarily style, layout and display the site’s content. When I say ‘visual’, I am referring to the output seen by the user agent (typical human user, search engine robot, a blind user or even a novice web user).

CSS, Cascading Style Sheets, has been proclaimed as a breakthrough in Web design because it allowed developers to control the style and layout of multiple Web pages all at once – truly separating style and mark-up. CSS was a very controversial topic as it became more main-stream. It forced business developers, web managers, designers and developers across the world to rethink their design/development practices. I am now asking for the same; to now think of ourselves as resources (business entities) – to demand a true separation between the visual presentation and the non-visual interaction.

Today’s technologies are advancing so rapidly; sometimes daily. Enhancements and breakthroughs in AJAX, Pear, XML, XSLT, C# and PHP have become so significant and so frequent that it is in the designers’ best interest to move-away from these skills sets and focus on what they know best; visual presentation and the user experience. How can one comfortably keep up with the programming world when advancements just as frequently are being made in XHTML, CSS, Flash and PhotoShop? New design trends and techniques are literally changing the face of our industry; we need to focus on our niche. Such buzzwords like Information Architecture, SEO, Usability, and Accessibility are being run by marketing departments through project managers with no design experience. The designer needs to reclaim these functions and incorporate them into mark-up that is just as beautiful as the visual design itself.

Have we truly lost the sense of teamwork? Have we developed an ‘every man for himself’ work environment. Back-end technologies differ pending many variables; I am not to say whether one should be using ASP, JAVA, .NET or PHP to run their site. I am confident in stating that regardless the site, XHTML, CSS and a strong design should be used and complimented with web-standards and best practices. That is a constant for any interactive property. Designers must strive to excel in what they know best and work closely with their colleagues in the back-end to produce the best possible site for the intended audience.

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