I find it funny that you can find 12 responses to every thread about "Review my site!" but not one here. Anyway, Code and Design are two very different concepts. I would give your programmer extra props for telling you straight up that his UI skills leave room to improve (and he probably doesn't care to improve them). Everyone makes their own art in their own ways.

What that means is either finding a designer to create your UI or doing it yourself. As long as your programmer is making something well documented/commented, and you have the design plans fairly well laid out then it shouldn't be difficult for an experienced designer to take over the finishing polish.

I agree with Nochek. backend and front end are totally different.

I too don't build pretty front end stuff. The way I would do it is to get all the functionality out there from the back end then let the front end guy format the layout etc.

So from your back end programmer what you should expect is that the all the front end FUNCTIONALITY be in place, form submissions, any ajax calls etc, but no layout or design.

Its a good idea to get them done separately.

Hey guys... Thanks for your responses.

I have rather a silly question... The "designer" of the front end, do they also have to have some type of programming knowledge? What type of skills do they need? Because I know an expert in photo shop cant just slap a PSD on the program.. So I'm trying to figure out what type of skills the designer should have.

Thanks for the help

First, I'll agree with the other posts above. It's pretty common to have both a designer and a developer.

A designer should be fairly comfortable with code, and how it works and what it's limitations are. They need to know what can be and what cannot be done, so they don't go off designing pieces for the website that just aren't going to work. Also, there needs to be communication between the designer and developer, and they need to find some common ground to speak on. Meaning, the designer needs to know a little about development, and the developer needs to know a little about design. Not a lot, not enough to do the whole job, just enough to talk intelligently about it.

I also agree with some of the other comments. If the developer is honest enough about his design skills, he's probably a good option. So many developers don't value the design work and figure they can handle it on their own. After all, they know what looks good, right? And who cares, as long as the site works? Finding a developer who understands the need for a good designer is a good first step.

concept still valid i think.

You could always do it the other way around. Work with a graphic designer to create screenshots of what the finished product will look like, then give these to the programmer and say "make it work".

I like this style of work. You can see what needs to be built and just have to connect up the backend.

In the case of windows software I cant say for certain because I don't build it. For websites absolutely you can expect to get it EXACTLY the same, (with the normal caveat of different browsers display things differently )

There are exceptions though, depending on the tools the programmer prefers. For example if you are using a pre-set package of tools like (e.g. jquery ui ) that already has a way it wants to do the buttons, then your designer designs buttons that dont look like the presets. The programmer then would have to ask you what you wanted to do.

programmer: "I want to use the jquery ui to help speed up developement, but the buttons look different to the ones in your designed screenshots. what should i do? use the UI to speed up development or take some extra time and make it look EXACTLY like you want it to look?"

you: "I understand it will take more time, which means it will cost more, but make it exactly like i want it." (OR "use the UI to speed up development.")

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For designing Windows Apps, no, it is nothing like cutting up a PSD and slapping it on.

The .NET framework is fairly simple to design with (get a copy of Visual Studio for free and start using their toolbox, its like using Paint for designing Apps) but the design has to be done through the framework. You can cut up pictures and use them (as buttons for instance) but depending on how large of scope your program is and how many threads its running, you may not want 100 pictures being loaded up and altered on the fly 300 times a second.

It would be better to have it built from code by a designer (when you said your programmer could do the back end fine and sucked at the front end, I had no doubt you were talking about the .NET framework. Took me years before I could make a decent enough UI to work with, and I'm still learning how to actually make things pretty).

Working from front-to-back or back-to-front only sucks for the second guy that has to integrate it, and that's only if the first guy sucks at describing/commenting what he did. If you have a layout already created (PSD like) of what you want, make sure both your programmer and your designer get the same copy. Then they will both know what the final product should look like, and they can both aim towards that goal.

its common to find programmers that arent that great at design aspects, puts hand up.

the good news is this isnt that hard to achieve, vis studio (the development software you will use to build the application) is already setup to handle things like this.

theres lots of ways you could do this but the best way for you to be involved in the project and learn along the way is to do the following...

grab a stack of paper and a pen and start drafting out where abouts you'd like all the controls to be displayed, controls are things like buttons, textboxes, dropdownlists, labels etc etc. my guess is you'll already have an idea of where you want all these controls to go in your application. use a different paper for each form that you are going to need. once you have a draft on paper of what you want the application layout to look like, get ready to have some fun

grab a copy of visual studio and find a tutorial that will teach you how to open a new project, place some controls and change each controls properties.. then take that knowledge and start putting all the controls you have on your paper draft into a form inside visual studio, desktop apps are alot easier to setup, you dont have to worry about floats and positioning, where you place the control is where its going to be, you can resize, rename, all sorts of stuff just using drag and drop and the properties window.

from here you should already have the basics of the application you want to build, then its just a matter of sharing that same form between your designer and programmer, you say to your programmer, i need this button here to do blah blah blah so he writes the code to make that happen, you then say to your designer i need this to look like blah blah blah and they'll give you the background images to make this look pretty or advise on fonts, layouts etc whatever they need at the time.

good luck with the project, sounds like fun