Ever since I managed a team of designers and developers at a previous employer, I’ve cared a lot about keeping the website creation process smooth and efficient. Traditionally, designers handled the look and feel before developers built the functionality, but that separation has never quite made sense to me. With modern CMS tools, especially since Say Hello began working exclusively with the WordPress Block Editor in 2019, design and development tasks increasingly overlap. Experts from each field working together from the start simply produces better results.
Although many clients and people in the WordPress community know me for technical work, I actually started out doing both design and development and I’ve continued to work with a foot in each camp throughout my thirty year career. It’s important to me to make sure that clients and their users can interact with websites easily, regardless of technical ability. That dual perspective helps avoid a common issue: designs that ignore technical considerations or accessibility, or development work that compromises the original vision.
Although I (as Say Hello) offer clients a complete service, from concept and design to building and maintenance, I work with specialist designers when necessary, especially on more complex projects. The key is collaboration. By working closely together throughout the process, we avoid the typical back-and-forth between “the design phase” and “the development phase”. Instead, we review decisions as we go, making sure design ideas are technically feasible and that implementation stays true to the intended look and feel.
This approach consistently leads to better outcomes. It keeps quality high on both the visual and technical sides, and it often reduces costs too, because we’re solving problems efficiently from the beginning, rather than fixing mismatches later.
In short: collaboration beats handoffs. It’s better for the final product, and better for the client’s budget.
Footnote
This post was partly inspired by an article by Matthias Ott, where he uses the term “web design engineer”. It’s a great way to describe how I work. I don’t just design or just develop, but combine both practices, shaping and fine-tuning the visual result directly in the browser, and build websites as part of a shared, collaborative process.
Lead image by Sven Mieke on Unsplash.
