A quick overview of what a web designer needs to know.<\/p>\n
Topics covered:<\/strong><\/p>\n 1.\tPillars of Professional Web Design. Pillars of Professional Web Design:<\/strong><\/p>\n The Definition:<\/p>\n I am referring to the sum total of what a web designer should know. The fact that we can now define this is a great thing. <\/p>\n I the recent past, a web designer was more of a vague profession, if one at all. Most ‘web designers’ were actually graphic designers moonlighting as web designers. They did not really understand the medium at all and we still see symptoms of this in websites all over the Web.<\/p>\n Symptoms that include sliced images, heavy pages, no thought or support for things like SEO, usability, accessibility, maintainability et cetera. In fact still today, many ‘web designers’ would have a hard time writing even simple CSS code.<\/p>\n The Pillars Of Professional Web Design<\/strong><\/p>\n \u00c2\u00b7\tHTML, CSS <\/p>\n DETAILS:<\/strong><\/p>\n HTML, CSS: <\/strong><\/p>\n Know the basics – web designers should not only be point-and-click web designers. All web designers should be able to create websites by handing coding. They don’t need to always hand code, but they should be comfortable editing and writing code.<\/p>\n Key Concepts you should know:<\/strong><\/p>\n 1.\tHow to create tags – basic page and tag rules.<\/p>\n Key HTML tags:<\/strong><\/p>\n CSS fundamentals:<\/strong><\/p>\n 2.\tWhat a doc-type is and what impact they have. Design: <\/strong>an understanding of basic design principles like alignment, color matching etc.<\/p>\n Usability:<\/strong> an understanding of how users use a website and how to structure a web page and a website.<\/p>\n Key concepts\/ideas:<\/strong><\/p>\n Accessibility: <\/strong>knowledge of the requirements to make website accessible. Besides things like alt attributes in images web designers should be sensitive to how a page is perceived by screen readers and should structure the markup to reflect this. Ex: put menus after the content.<\/p>\n SEO: <\/strong>an understanding of SEO practices: websites should be designed with SEO in mind from the get go.<\/p>\n Key concepts\/ideas:<\/strong><\/p>\n Best Practices: <\/strong>an understanding on how to properly write out code and structure pages and websites so that they are more easily maintained.<\/p>\n Key concepts\/ideas:<\/strong><\/p>\n You need to do some homework if you have problems with the any of the points listed above. <\/p>\n – –<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The Future of Web Design.<\/strong><\/p>\n Building websites from scratch, will soon become something akin to a carpenter going into the forest to cut down tress for wood to build a house. The modern web designer\/developer will be using one of 3 things to build most, if not all websites:<\/p>\n 1.\tWebsite templates. Side note:<\/strong> broadband is in, so audio and video content is in – you should understand the basics of audio and video on the web. Learn about podcasting, streaming video and so on.<\/p>\n – –<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Getting your first web design Job.<\/strong><\/p>\n The most important thing you can do is build a portfolio. Degrees and other pieces of paper telling us you know what you’re doing aren’t worth nearly as much as examples of your work.<\/p>\n With that in mind you should:<\/strong><\/p>\n 1.\tHave you own website and your own domain name. The key is to complete as many websites (from start to finish,) as you can, each time improving on what you do and trying something new each time.<\/p>\n Anecdote: <\/strong>When I hire people (as I occasionally do,) resumes are the least of my concern \u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 people can pad them. I look to previous work.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A quick overview of what a web designer needs to know.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.killersites.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.killersites.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.killersites.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.killersites.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.killersites.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.killersites.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4766,"href":"https:\/\/www.killersites.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30\/revisions\/4766"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.killersites.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.killersites.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.killersites.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n2.\tThe Future of Web Design.
\n3.\tGetting your first web design Job.<\/p>\n
\n\u00c2\u00b7\tBasic Design
\n\u00c2\u00b7\tUsability
\n\u00c2\u00b7\tAccessibility
\n\u00c2\u00b7\tSEO
\n\u00c2\u00b7\tBest Practices<\/p>\n\n
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\n3.\tThe difference between inline and block-level tags – do you know the box model?
\n4.\tHow CSS can be used to change tags from being block-level and inline and the use of this ability.<\/p>\n\n
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\n2.\tBlogs.
\n3.\tCMS.<\/p>\n
\n2.\tYou should be looking for web design work now. Do a stage, build a site for a friends business.
\n3.\tBe prepared to constantly learn new things.
\n4.\tYou may apply for 25 jobs before you get a gig. In the meantime, build websites.
\n5.\tConsider the option of doing freelance work. <\/p>\n