I would prefer to have the web-design task completely separated from programming. From my experience designing a store or a site in general is a very demanding process. Now with the term web-designer I mean someone who can create original art and at the same time has a good understanding of the site requirements on a high level.

So say if it’s to startup an e-shop I would expect the web-designer to know the basics of how the store operates as it’s critical for the user interface. But I would not expect him to know how to integrate with a particular framework (or to know jscripts, php or slicing or SEO). Obviously you did work with various ecommerce packages so you can understand my point.

The problem I am having with web designers is that lots of details about the layout are not initially exposed and I have to ask. This can be problematic in cases where I may have a contract from a client to do just the programming aspect of a site (instead of using an in-house associate who specializes on web-design). In such a case, the designer maybe employed by the client and so passing info back and forth is time consuming and difficult to understand at times.

When you specialize for long time on a certain area you tend to ignore details that are useful to others and this can delay the project completion.

For example, with the web-design details I mentioned, say I receive the basic pages for the store like the front page, a listing page, a product page and a sample form page. If the designer sends it in jpg (honestly I don’t care how he creates them) I will have to check the fonts for the various headings descriptions etc. in order to find a match for the finalized stylesheet. Here the detail is, he did not mentioned the font type or size.

Same goes for the palette where the basic colors are critical to generate correctly the various elements for the user interface. Sending a separate image for the RGB values can ease the task of a programmer.

Then we have the dynamic elements for the store like navigation or popup windows (large images, help/text, link titles) and many more. Good web-designers can give you this kind of resources to speed up the programming work as well as they can help to bring the store’s layout very close (if not 100%) to match the client’s request. They don’t need to have programming expertise to draw additional images that can assist a programmer. If they can explain how they want to see the various dynamic elements of the UI is good enough for me.

At the programming level a s/w engineer can simply execute what the web-designer has in mind. For me at least, these are 2 different areas they should be kept separated in a project.