Web Development Team Structure: Who - Does - What?

Web Development Team Structure: 
Who - Does - What? 

When you hire a website development company to develop your website from scratch, you may ask yourself: “What are the different roles for these specialists in the building of my website?”. This comprehensive post will cover all you need to know about ‘Who Does What’ in this team, duties, responsibilities, and roles correlation. 

How a Typical Web Development Team Looks Like.

From experience, developing a website and having it work is not just a matter of programming it. There is a lot of thinking that also needs to be put in its design and marketing, therefore the structure of the team must fulfill these targets and include professionals with various expertise and skills. Not every project requires a full stack of specialists, as the size, nature, and complexity of the project may determine that multiple tasks could be handled by certain specialists. The size and specialty of the web development company may require a different structure, however, the typical technical team looks like the following: 

• Requirement Analyst 

• Project Manager

• UX/UI Designers

• Web Developers

• Quality Assurance Engineer

• SEO Specialist

• Marketing Strategist

And the non-technical team whose responsibility is achieving the marketing targets looks like the following:

Requirement Analyst:

The main responsibility of the “Requirement Analyst” is to understand the client’s aspirations and objectives from this website, analyze them, and interpret the outcomes into extensive technical specifications. These will be utilized by the technical and non-technical teams to place a timeframe and prepare for the project.

Project Manager PM:

The project manager’s first step is to become well familiar with the technical specifications and the deadlines of the project. Accordingly, the PM will then make a comprehensive plan for the project and define its mile-stones.

After that, the PM observes and controls all the aspects of the project, to make sure that the development is progressing as planned and the milestones are achieved on time. After each milestone, the PM presents to the client the progress on the website and provide them with a demo to collect their comments, feedback,  recommendations, and approval. 

User Experience UX/ User Interface UI designers:

The UX/UI designer’s first step is to fully understand the website’s specifications, objectives and analyzing the target audience to see the whole idea of the project. This way he/she can point out the users’ purposes from using the website, and specify the challenges to successfully resolve them with design. The designer then turns to pinpoint the user task module that aid to keep focused and always bear in mind the interface's purposes. Create a user storyboard consists of multiple wireframes to identify what the user suppose to achieve by using the interface. At this point, the role of the user experience designer ends up for the designer to carry on the interface design.

The UX designer’s focus is mainly on the research and structure, The UI designer emphasis the visual appearance. Color schemes, logos, icons, fonts, etc. Apparently, the UI designer designs a prototype based on the UX stage and tests its usability. The prototype can be interactive or static. 

Besides the UX/UI designers, the job will also need a graphic designer within the project’s team. These specialists work on the visual concept of the project (custom illustrations, fonts, logos) and take care of animations. 

Web developers:

The developers are mainly the programmers who transform the completed design into a functioning product that can be used by users on the internet. Their roles and responsibilities are divided into two parts:

Front-end developers: They take care of the user-side of the interface using such languages as HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Front-end developers program an interface part by part according to a prototype given to them by UX/UI designers. This way, their main role is to make sure the website looks good on any device/browser and ensure all its elements function correctly. 

Back-end developers: Their main role is to program the server-side code using different languages and frameworks such as JavaScript, Python, PHP..etc. They are also responsible for the creation of databases and content management systems (CMSs)

Full-stack developers: These are the developers that are the most in-demand, as they can build both a User-side and server-side of the project on their own. 

Quality assurance engineer
QA or a Quality Assurance engineer’s main responsibility is managing the debugging work of the project, and that is by monitoring the programming step by step and ensuring the product has no bugs in it. QA engineers put a testing plan. When the programming starts, the programmers send each code of the program to QA engineers. They test whether it corresponds to technical specifications and the demands of a customer. When bugs are found, QA engineers make a bug report, and forward it to programmers who fix those bugs. Then follows a check-back that's intended to make sure the problem was completely solved. QA engineers can also report designers if they find a usability issue and suggest them a solution.

Digital Marketing Team

Programming and developing the website is the first step, but its marketing is another. As we need the technical team to develop the interface from nothing, having the digital marketing team is essential to make the product visible. No matter how good the website is developed, or the product it is offering, having it stand out from rivals is vital for its success.

Marketing strategist (MS)
The marketing strategist's role in the digital marketing team is similar to the PM's role in the technical team. That is because both of them hold the responsibility from the planning to the post-launch stage. The key role of an MS is to develop an effective strategy that helps the project to achieve its objectives and make sure of the success of this strategy. 

Usually, the strategist monitors the performance of the various marketing campaigns and determines if the project's objectives are achieved. In other words, the MS does whatever is possible to engage the target audience and stimulate them to act.

SEO expert

The Search Engine Optimization expert manages a very important function to stimulate the target audience to the website. The involvement of the SEO specialist starts from the first stages of the web development project, before anyone else from the same team.

Depends on the project, the responsibilities of the SEO specialist include but are not limited to:

• Keywords research;

• Traffic & metrics analysis;

• Competitor analysis;

• Optimizing website's work in accordance with search engines requirements;

• Cooperation with writers and designers.

 In general, the key responsibility of SEO specialists is improving the website rank within different search engines.

Visit our Facebook page