To do business in this day and age, you need a website. It’s the easiest way for customers to find you and learn about your products and services.

Increasingly, consumers want businesses to have well-designed, user-friendly, sophisticated websites—and if you don’t have one, it can cloud their perception of you. In other words, no website = unsuccessful. A bad website is even worse than no website.

So if you need to build a website (and most likely you do if you don’t already have one) or your current one needs a revamping, it’s important to understand the difference between two experts that could play a role in creating that new wow-inducing website: web designers and web developers.

What is the difference?

First, the similarities. They both will help you build your website, but that’s pretty much where it ends. They play very different roles in the process.

Web designers focus on the aesthetics of a website and its overall functionality. They will create a layout that is user-friendly, pick the color scheme and fonts, and develop images and other visuals. They pay close attention to how colors complement each other and the overall balance of the website. It’s their job to make sure the website is both visually appealing and easy to use.

A web designer will work with you to fully understand your audience, your brand, your core messaging, and your overall business goals, and then come up with a web design that specifically meets those needs.

Web developers, on the other hand, tend to work behind the scenes. They use programming and coding to build the website’s core structure. They take the design established by the web designer and make it a reality, creating all the necessary pages and ensuring that it functions as required.

While designers may recommend features, such as sliders, animations, chat boxes, Call to Action buttons, and interactive features, it is the developers that create those elements.

Which do you need for your business?

Chances are, you need both. You need a web designer to offer insight and guide you through the process of creating a visually appealing, user-friendly website. You will need a web developer to bring that vision to life.

If you have in-house personnel who can build the website, you may only need to work with a designer. And if you have an employee with an artistic eye and a deep understanding of consumers’ website behaviors, you may only need to hire a developer.