Can someone who doesn't code still be considered a developer?

Hello.

I am not a web developer, but I came to this website because I desperately want an honest answer from a community of developers for my question about a couple of web developers my company hired.

I am a graphic designer working for a small graphic design studio. I know a little bit about HTML and CSS, but not enough to build a website from a blank slate or anything like that. Our studio doesn't do web design. We are a group of print-design specialists. We've always used Squarespace to have our portfolio website, but we didn't know what we were doing, the site was super-slow, and we decided we were better off hiring a professional web developer to have something better.

So, we hired the first guy. He said he could build a full-custom website from scratch with a photo gallery to showcase our past design work beautifully. We paid him $1,000 for it. He did his job, and we were okay with it until my friend mentioned that he'd seen something similar to our website elsewhere. It turned out that he stole the website template they were using for their website and tweaked just a few elements. He didn't do any meaningful "development" at all.

We decided to re-do it again, and we hired another guy. He insisted that we should build our site on WordPress. We paid him around $2,500 to do the work. Again, it looked nice with all the bells and whistles front and back, but it was s.l.o.w. He kept telling us that it was just how things were with a full-featured website nowadays. This time, we dug a little deeper on the technical side of things. To our shock, we found out that this guy used a $50 off-the-shelf premium theme, removed all the branding stuff to hide where it originally came from and made it look like he built it from scratch.

We confronted both of them on separate occasions. They both insisted that it was standard practice. They said it was common for a developer to start with some pre-made stuff to avoid reinventing the wheel much like automobile companies outsource their manufacturing. Quite honestly, we aren't buying it. They are ultimately saying that "custom website" is a matter of tweaking some templates, and they could call themselves a "developer" doing that. How is that different from us doing Squarespace then?? We could've done what these guys did if we knew it was how these guys built their "custom sites." We can't help feeling ripped off.

So, with all that considered, my question is this. Is it normal in your field to regard someone as a "developer" or a "programmer" even if all you do is to tweak a few things and not build something from scratch? How do you qualify someone as "developer" in your field? Maybe our expectation is not reasonable and maybe it is just the way things are when it comes to website constructions? Or, are we getting ripped off?