One question that comes up every so often is whether you need a degree to get a web design job?<\/p>\n
The short answer to this is:<\/strong> it depends!<\/p>\n THE TOP 3 FACTORS IN GETTING WEB DESIGN JOB<\/strong><\/p>\n When I’m talking about a web design job, I am not talking about becoming a contractor or opening your own web design business. I am talking about going to work for some company.<\/p>\n Now that we’ve cleared that up, here are the top 3 factors:<\/p>\n How important the degree is depends on how big the company is. The larger the company, the more bureaucracy you will have to deal with … that means company policy will factor into this, and that usually means degrees are important.<\/p>\n That said, highly skilled and experienced people can get around this … even in the biggest of companies.<\/p>\n What about coding skills?<\/strong><\/p>\n Some of you may be asking, how about knowledge of web standards, CSS, HTML? Sadly, the only people who care about those skills are other web designers and to a lessor extent, web programmers.<\/p>\n But why is this so … how can good technical web knowledge be so unimportant? The reason is simple my young weblings:<\/p>\n … the people hiring web designers are looking for design ability<\/strong> and not coding ability<\/strong>. After all, the job title is ‘web DESIGNER’ and not ‘web coder’.<\/em><\/p>\n Beyond that, most of the people hiring don’t have a clue about code. They may know a little bit about HTML and CSS, but they would probably have kittens trying to create a hyperlink!<\/p>\n Code-Monkey’s Can’t Design (typically)<\/strong><\/p>\n Some people enter the web design world only to find out that they can’t design worth a dime … but these same people are typically much better coders. Or as I like to call them: ‘code-monkeys’<\/p>\n You see, if you are a born ‘code-monkey’, chances are you will never be able to design a good looking page … or draw a straight line. <\/p>\n From my 14 years experience doing design and web design work, I’ve found that design ability is something you are born with … you either have it or you don’t, and no amount of training or schooling is going to help you if you don’t have the talent.<\/p>\n With that in mind, it is important that you figure out where your strengths lie and play to them.<\/p>\n … if you are a code-monkey (as I am,) then you need to look into the profession of ‘Web Developer’ and forget about being a ‘Web Designer’.<\/p>\n Web Developer vs. Web Designer<\/strong><\/p>\n What’s the difference between a web designer<\/strong> and a web developer<\/strong>?<\/p>\n A web developer is someone who builds web applications – sometimes called ‘database driven websites<\/a>‘.<\/p>\n Esssentially, a web developer is concerned about the functionality<\/strong> of a website and not neccesarily the look. When I’m talking about functionality, I am talking about things like, contact forms, shopping carts and anything else that takes a website from just being a series of pages, to being an engine that preforms some task. <\/p>\n These types of sites are built using languages like PHP, PERL, Ruby and many others.<\/p>\n … read the article on database driven websites<\/a> for more details.<\/p>\n\n