Front-end vs Back-end

A friend told me once that being a web page designer was everything but easy. Then he told me that web 2.0 made the business arguably different, harder and surrounded by certain confusion.

He continued saying…Today everyone with internet access can create web content. There are plenty of sites that allow users to “build” their own space inside the web, to customize it, and to make it grow. For example this blog, I was able to choose how it looks and what information it has although my knowledge in web pages is quite limited. Some people took real advantage from this growing tool learning how to make a web page look like royalty.

At the end, they were working for companies for much less than what a professional would charge. Low price for a nice web page sounds good…

But what happens when the outlook is the only pretty thing of a web page? Bad news.

We can say that sites can be divided into the front-end and the back-end. The front-end is the part that interacts directly with the users. The part that we can see (page layout, pictures, video, graphics…). The back end has to do with how you control the portal. The back end is the administrative part

The face and the brain behind it, we can say.

Some of the activities involved are:

Front-end tasks:

-The graphic elements
-Animations
-Creating templates (like the ones we chose for our blogs)

-Java

-Creating mockups (a non functional model of something)

Back-end tasks:

-Loading times

-Search optimization

-Testing

-Application design (to help the user)

-General configurations

-Trouble shooting

-Coding

The lesson of this little story is that we can not have something like front-end vs. back-end. But we need them to work as a team creating synergies. Specially in this era of communication in which we are leaving. People want a pretty site but they also want it to work properly. We need an excellent front-end designer, but we also need a back-end master in order to accomplish an excellent customer experience.