Websites should be designed, not developed
There’s a trend and it’s been going for quite a while. For at least ten years now, there is a push to turn everyone into a programmer. Programming is presented as a necessary skill for the 21st century.
Some people even compare the lack of having any programming skills to a sort of illiteracy. If you can’t program, if you can’t develop software in some way, you will be disadvantaged in everything you do. Your job will be taken and your social circle will be limited.
Slowly, this trend has infiltrated in the way we make websites. You are no longer a webdesigner; You are a frontend developer. You use build tools to package and minimize your assets. You use a package manager to keep track of dependencies and your developer tools. There are compilers to generate the assembly of webdesign (CSS). And then there is the content management system (CMS) which uses themes, templates and plugins. All of which you need to manage or even have to code yourself.
I believe this trend hurts us. It leaves many people on the roadside. Unable or unwilling to keep up with this relentless push for ever more complex systems. It builds up barriers which are hard to overcome, especially for the most creative people among us. Ultimately it makes the web less interesting and less fun for younger people to take up building stuff themselves. It encourages conformity and sameness, because it is easier to reuse the same components, themes, and other things than to build them yourself.
In the last few years I’ve met a lot of creative people, who either left the webdesign and development business completely. Or they have limited themselves to tweaking templates made by someone else. They do this because they no longer get to experience the satisfaction of creating something just by themselves. There’s no way a webdesigner today can design, implement and publish a fully working website without knowledge of programming. Not when the website needs to be editable, when it needs to be a living, changing creation. A website that is added or updated, by someone without knowledge of design, let alone programming.
That’s not all, the costs of creating bespoke websites is spiralling out of control. Whilst WordPress, Wix, and free themes are simultaneously cutting out the bottom of the market. It’s getting more and more difficult for independent agencies to defend their value and prices. Only by going for the top of the market and create genuinely bespoke websites that are more applications and services with a website draped around them, can agencies make a decent living. But this means the core of their value is no longer design, branding and marketing: It is code.
I have a confession to make: I’m a developer. Since the age of 14 I knew I was going to be one. I studied Computer Science. And I’ve build complex applications. Over the years — I am 44 now — I started to appreciate the value of design. I’ve even learned enough to create things which aren’t seen as ugly.
I found that we can’t make things that people love, without design. Without inspired and creative design. Design that can be disruptive, breaking the rules to find entirely new ways of communicating ideas and interacting with technology. This is a skillset which is not easily combined with a programming mindset. The way of thinking, the ‘laws’ and rules are different. Everything about it is in almost polar opposition.
With this in mind I think that instead of making designers work and act more like programmers do, we should go the opposite direction. We should make sure technology works the way our best designers and most creative thinkers think. Instead of educating people how to work with our technologies, we should make our technology ‘learn’ how to work with people. As a developer I believe this is our mission. The mission of developers everywhere to make sure that there’s no need for everyone to be like us.
The technology we make should be a mirror of us as human. It should be in service of us and our best skills and features.
Not the other way around.
At SimplyEdit this has been our driving force for quite some time now. We’ve tried a lot and made many errors, but I firmly believe we’re getting close to this goal. If you are a designer and what I’ve said here resonates with you, why don’t you check out our progress at SimplyEdit and try it out for yourself?
