Web Designer vs Web Developer

I have received a blog link from one of the members of Cebu Graphic Artists in yahoogroups. With his article, I can see that he can write very well and can present his ideas properly with good vocabulary and grammar, and I was a bit curious since rarely I could see a graphic artist who can do that. So I ran a quick search of his profile on friendster.com and verified his love for writing; he's a bookworm per se.

His article is lengthy for me, and without reading the whole of it, one could say that he's quite good, no doubt about it. I continued reading since he'd mentioned about web development. Somewhere in his article, I have read the line "...I feel that in order to be a more effective web designer, I needed to get really friendly with mySQL and PHP..." The first thing that comes to my mind was "Damn! What does PHP have anything to do with web designing?" For me, he was like saying that no artists can be really effective unless they know how to do PHP.

I was thinking that maybe this guy was a newbie with Web Designing and Development, and so I commented on his article--not on his blog, but on the mailing list. I said that PHP has nothing to do with his skills on creating web designs. If he wants to be an effective web designer, he has to deal with CSS, or maybe go deeper with Javascript so he can work on with DHTML and action scripting. Therefore, to be an effective web designer, one has to learn the essentials of Web Designing, not the essentials of Programming. There's nothing wrong in learning other things, but with his statement, that was really a misconception. I was a bit surprised with his reply though. My intention was not to insult or discredit him, but to help him see the light on becoming an effective web designer. Instead, he seemed to be embarrassed and began defending his thoughts the wrong way. My respect for him as a writer was gone, and I have realized that he can write well in English but doesn't make sense at all.