The Designer, The Developer, and The Marketer

Have you read the book E-Myth Revisited by Michael E. Gerber? It's a book for those who would want to enter and succeed in business. The author said in the book that everybody who goes into business is actually three-people-in-one: The Entrepreneur, The Manager, and the Technician. I would not discuss those personalities here. But I want to share an idea something similar to that. I'd like to propose that those who would want to succeed in the web must at least be composed of three persons or a three-people-in-one man/woman: The Designer, The Developer, and The Marketer (not in rank or importance).



The Designer - he's the visual person. The one who decides everything pertaining to the aesthetics of a web property, from colors, to fonts, to images and icons, to the the layout and positioning of all page components. He knows Photoshop and Imageready and all other design editing tools. He's the guy who goes out of the way to make the web pages visually pleasing, interesting and impressive. He's more like Steve Jobs and not Bill Gates. Without the designer, a website looks unprofessional/amateurish, out of trend, bland, and visually boring.

The Developer - he's the code guy. He can be the front-end or the back-end. He builds the structure/skeleton upon which the web property stands stable. He knows CSS, Javascript, AJAX, PHP, MySQL, e-commerce integration, call out all other IT-jargon and abbreviations coz he's the programmer and also the tech-support guy. He cares more about the features and functionalities of a site than the color of the fonts. He's happy when the forms are foolproof and error-free. Without the developer, I wonder what would Google and YouTube look like. It's like saying what would buildings look like without architects and engineers.

The Marketer - he's the business guy. For him it's the content that matters. It's the traffic that matters. It's the ranking that matters. He's the blogger, the SEO, the social networker. He directs what should be communicated to the audience. He cares which product should be featured on the homepage. He cares about the copywrite, the marketing words that convinces the minds. He believes that "Content is King" and all else are pawns or rooks or knights. He either creates the content or hires suppliers. He visits all directories and every networking platform there is to promote his store. Without the marketer, the website will just be out of sight.

Well I'd like to think that it requires these three persons for a web property to become excellent and successful. What would a website look like if it's just built by the designer alone, the developer alone, or the marketer alone? I bet you have a hint. What if it's a two-man team? The Designer-Developer would focus on web standards, the usability, the beauty but the site lacks the content necessary to keep the site moving up the ranks. The Designer-Marketer would focus on the impressiveness and copywrite but the site lacks dynamic structure or user interaction; they might as well produce only static htmls and are ignorant of benefits of AJAX on user experience. The Developer-Marketer would boast of the quantity and output of their content database , but the site looks unreliable because it isn't layouted and designed properly, the page components are not in visual unity.

We could all live with not-so-good websites. But we patronize those that are excellent. As I've stated above, the three persons could also be three-people-in-one. I believe that they can also be called skillsets that an individual aspiring web entrepreneur must each develop. Disclaimer: I'm not three-in-one yet. I'm more of a designer-developer. This post and all this blogging is my way of training the newbie marketer in me.