Eh, when it comes to web design/development I would say not so much - I'm a programmer at heart, but I started out on the web making the front end pages. Now I definitely can't make something as pretty as a lot of sites I've seen, but when you break it down logically, design is just a function of form, the same way writing readable and well structured code is. If you take any kind of design/development course in college, one of the things they teach you, generally in a course called something similar to 'fundamentals of design', is that even artistic design can be reduced to its parts, line, shape, colour, form and texture. If you think about those like variables, conditionals and iterators, you can make your brain work in that direction too.

I'm trying to think of a good analogy, but can't at the moment - so I'll just say it like this; developing for the web is more than just one part. Oversimplified, there's the back end, and the front end, and even though you focus on one, it can't hurt to know at least part of the other.
-m