What does a web designer do?
A web designer decides what a website looks like and how a visitor moves through it. The structure of the pages, the layout of each one, the type, the color, the imagery, the navigation, the way the site responds as the screen shrinks from a monitor to a phone. They work from the brand and the site's goals, produce wireframes and then full designs, usually in a design tool with a clickable prototype, and hand them to a developer with everything needed to build them. On smaller projects they build the site themselves on a platform such as WordPress or Webflow.
The role overlaps with UX and UI design but is broader and more brand-led. A web designer on a marketing site is thinking about first impressions, storytelling and conversion as much as about components and flows, and they are often the person who also designs the email, the landing page and the social graphics that send people to the site.
Why it matters
Why a web designer matters
The website is the one place a brand fully controls, and often the first place a prospect looks. A well-designed site says what the brand is in a glance, makes the next step obvious and loads fast enough that the visitor stays. A badly designed one undermines every other piece of marketing that points at it, because the ad, the post and the press all lead to the same page. For a studio or an agency the site is the portfolio, and a portfolio that is hard to navigate is a quiet verdict on the work.
In practice
How a web designer works in practice
- 01
The designer begins with the goals and the audience, the content that exists and the content that will need to be made, and a site map that organizes it. Wireframes come next, to settle structure and hierarchy before anyone argues about color. Then the visual design: a system of type, color, components and imagery applied to the key page templates, shown at desktop and phone sizes, with a prototype that stakeholders can click through.
- 02
Once approved, the designs go to development with specifications, assets and the rules for how pages behave as they resize. The designer reviews the build, checks it on real devices and tunes the details that only show up in a browser. After launch the site is measured and iterated: pages added, templates adjusted, the design kept alive rather than frozen at launch.
At RIOT
Web designers at RIOT
This glossary lives on a site we designed ourselves, and every term is a page that has to read well on a phone, sit comfortably among our films and send people on to the work and to each other. Designing the site that carries your own portfolio is a useful discipline: there is nobody else to blame for the page.
Watch out
What people get wrong about web designers
Designing for the designer's screen. Most visitors arrive on a phone, often on a slow connection, and a site that only works on a large display with fast internet works for the agency and not for the audience. The other mistake is designing the home page and leaving the rest to the developer. The article page, the case study, the contact form and the 404 are where visitors spend their time, and each deserves a designed template.
