Most companies started to have a website in this digital era to increase their visibility so that the users may choose them over other competitors. So instead of finding a designer who designs a website, the companies started looking for full-stack designers who can design a website using codes. The web designers are expected to work on both the frontend and backend designing processes. A web designer should develop skills, such as user experience(UX)/user interface(UI) design, graphic design, coding knowledge, SEO(search engine optimization), communication, etc., to stand out from other designers.
1. Advantage of Knowing Web Design Theory: Knowing web design theory will help designers to design websites by keeping users in mind. The fundamentals of web design theory deal with the structure, colour theory and user experience, which are essential to creating a web design that makes users spend more time on the website. Good navigation and eye-catching visual designs will help users to find the information quickly and easily and take the required action. Learning and incorporating information architecture(IA) in your while designing a website will help build a quality website.
2. Is Coding Knowledge Necessary? Learning some programming languages makes designers stand out from other designers and gives them an upper hand to explore the possibilities of customising a design. Nowadays, most designing companies look for designers who have basic knowledge about CSS(Cascading Style Sheets) and HTML(Hypertext Markup Language) because these are the most commonly used languages while designing a website. CSS deals with the visual appearance(style and layout) of a website, whereas HTML gives the structure to a website and helps place the contents at appropriate positions.
3. Three Things that Makes a Web Designer Stand Out: Designers should be familiar with the essential tools that are used in the current web and graphic design industry. It may seem insignificant for a web designer to learn the image or graphic editing software, such as Adobe Illustrator or Photoshop, but it comes in handy during critical situations when a need arises to fix a graphic design. Resizing and compressing are the two most commonly performed tasks by web designers, so knowing the basics is more than enough.
Content Management System(CMS) allows multiple users to have access to modify, manage and create web content. It helps web designers who aren’t familiar with coding or have less coding knowledge to build and host websites with lots of templates and plugin options.
Prototyping is a vital part of UX(user experience) design which helps designers to foresee the final version of the website. The prototype assists clients to finalise the design, and designers can now spend time sculpting the perfect website design instead of finishing the entire design and waiting for approval from clients.
4. It’s Good to Know Some SEO Practices: Though the website design looks astounding, only the best SEO(search engine optimization) strategies can improve a site’s visibility. SEO, a set of processes, deals with the appearance and ranking position in SERPs(search engine results page). It helps Google crawl out of thousands and thousands of other websites, at the same time, makes the website user-friendly.
5. Improve Your Communication Skills: Communication skill is important besides web designing skills because it helps communicate with your clients and team effectively to get better results. Teamwork is essential in all fields of industry, so effective communication between team members is necessary to build a website that meets the client’s requirements instead of their own version.
6. Scrutinize Your Work to Improve the Quality: Web designers have to examine their work often so that they can learn and improve the techniques to achieve perfection. Testing the web page frequently helps the designers evaluate the page load speed and check whether the site works well in mobile and desktop versions without any issues.
7. Show Your Talent Through a Portfolio: Nowadays, the companies who are looking for web designers demand skill, experience and knowledge. So having a strong portfolio helps companies understand the potential a web designer has and choose over others who know only the web design theory. Since the number of web designers is increasing day by day, it is necessary to have a portfolio to show your uniqueness and creativity. 8. Stay with the Upcoming Trends: Since the designs and trends keep changing, web designers should keep updating to the latest trends and techniques to avoid becoming outdated. Though the design shows uniqueness and creativity, it should complement the current trend to sustain long in this designing industry. The designers can check out the social media platform where other designers share their work and get inspiration to build a website that matches the current trend.