| Front-end developer here. Yes, that is what I do. We have some really talented developers who design some awesome images of what the websites should like. (Hopefully as a photoshop file. Or at least, something that let me get exact measures and layers.) If it's a small project, made to be beautiful, they will do the whole design of all the pages. If it's a huge Agile project, they would instead give me a style guide. Then, I quickly turn everything into reusable HTML blocks and do the CSS (using LESS). If needed, I'll make custom jQuery (or pure Javascript, but that never happens, really) modules for the template. It's very quick. A full page templates takes me about 1 to 2 hours, if it's very, very complex I may take up to 4 hours. While I'm working on those, the back-end guys are working of making the CMS work correctly. Sometimes, I give them the templates before they program the page, but most of the time I end up attacking the page after them. I then simply use the building blocks they gave me (and turn all the divs they made into the right HTML5 tags). We use a lot of different CMS and some of the websites have custom backend (no CMS). We develop in both PHP and .Net. I know PHP, and I'm comfortable developing Drupal websites. However, I don't get a lot of fun making the backend. The only time I would do it if we are working on a one pager or something like that, since it's faster if I do both back and front for project that are not complex. I prefer working on the front-end. And I do mean front-end development. Not simply mindlessly slicing a PSD into an HTML page or adding content from a Word document. |