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Author Bio: Steve Jones
There is unlimited scope for a good web designer in IT industry, which is one of the booming sectors now across the globe. One of the major reason behind creative people choosing web designing as their career is that the demand for websites will never come down as far as the internet exists. In fact, a web designer is not focused on creating beautiful sites, but they are effectively contributing to various aspects of IT and business operations.
People using the internet and mobile phones are increasing day by day and so as the number of websites and mobile applications. Thus, the need for any business is not just to have a site, but a remarkable presence to get the users on to their web pages and hold them back there to think and act in favor of their business interests. Attracting users and retaining them is mostly the skillfulness of a web designer and this factor makes this career so charming.
Who can become a web designer?
Web design is an open career option for aspirants from any background. It is ideal for someone to have a good sense of designs, colors, and a pinch of creativity to become a successful designer professional. Adding to it, successful web designers are good in the ability to understanding business objectives and work in hand with marketers, developers, and administrators.
What are the opportunities?
There is a large number of opportunities for web designers in:
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IT companies
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Web development and hosting companies
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Advertising agencies
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Publishing houses
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Media agencies
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Design and development studios
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Manufacturing and marketing firms
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Educational institutions etc.
Apart from employment, one can also think of establishing successful freelancing career in web designing. The growth of a web design professional is directly proportional to their creativity, skills, and experience.
Web presence is a mandatory need for any businesses, including small start-ups, and so is the demand for web designers. As it is vital to maintain a website which is more interactive and attractive, the job of a web designer is also very competitive now.
A good designer needs to have expertise in analysis, planning, solution designing, content making, infographics, presentations, etc. Other skill-set of a designer also include photography, graphic designing, Flash, HTML, JavaScript, etc. One mandatory requirement for any web designing project now is responsive design, which a new-age web designer should master.
Starting as a web designer
With constantly changing standards and technologies, web designing is a complex field, but thanks to the user-friendly tools and techniques which makes complex tasks easier for a designer. If you want to become a full-stack web designer, you need to gain knowledge, skills, and experience.
The first step in web designing career can be pretty simple. There are many resources available online and offline to help you start with the basic web designing tools and practices. Further, in this article, we will discuss a few steps to follow in the journey to becoming an established web design professional.
1. Do some basic research to start with
Before diving into the vast field of web design and development, you have to define your goals properly. Being a huge, multifaceted industry, web development may put you into chaos if you don’t know which niche sectors you choose to work in. The major categories are graphic design, web design, WordPress development, web development, etc.
You can do extensive research to gather information about these all and choose which areas you find matching to your interest. You can view some expert YouTube channels or read some classic books or blogs by BigDropInc.com on this topic to get some insight.
2. Start by learning the basics
Like any other profession, there are some fundamentals to be known in case of web design and development too. Learning such things will give a fresh web design career aspirant some in-depth understanding of what you are doing and how to go about it rather than simply copying some others work. We may not be able to cover all aspects of web design fundamentals here, but a few major things for you to understand include:
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Design best practices – Web design concepts keep on changing. Say, for example, SEO relevant design and responsive design is mandatory now.
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The layout of a web page – This is the most fundamental skill of s designer, and one should understand how to build a user-friendly and appealing layout to every page you design.
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Color scheme and typography – This is another basic thing a designer should know. To make the best choice, one should know the industry standards regarding typography and the best choices in color schemes for various websites.
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UI and UX – User interface (UI) and User experience (UX) are a couple of other things, which come a bit complicated when into work. Reading about it can be a good start, and it is also essential to go through the UI and UX approach of the successful websites to gain a proper insight on what makes them successful.
3. Practice like an athlete (GREAT SPORTS JOKES)
Back in the 90’s, it was the Space Jam website which was considered as the standard of web design. Now, there are plenty of tools to use, but one golden rule you should remember is that the tools should not restrict you if you are a professional designer.
For a web designer, the key to master something is learning by doing. You should learn and try to experiment by utilizing your skills outside your area of expertise. Practice more and more, and to strengthen your application skills are the key to success for a seasoned web designer.
Before starting to do coding, one should first choose a reliable text editor. To test your designs, you should also install all available browsers. The development versions of these are available, which will help you to test your work from various types of users across the globe.
To start with, you can be thorough with HTML and CSS before starting with JavaScript and Bootstrap for responsive design practices. After this, you can also try with PHP to horn yourself to a complete web developer. There are plenty of online websites and forums too to help professional web designers to learn new technologies.