You have some talent for computer skills and enough free time, and you are not employed? Well, how about you spend a month or two of your life to train yourself to become a web designer? While there are courses and classes that you can take that will lead you into the business, it’s much more important that you can dedicate a lot of time and effort into what you are doing, while web design can’t be said to be hard you still need to be able to think in a certain way, and, of course, to have a creative flare – that’s what all designers should have in common.
First of all, a web designer designs web pages, but that isn’t just the visual page, how the site looks like (although that is a pretty big part of it), but what are it’s features, how does it run and so on. A web site is a person’s window into the content they are looking at, and if that window is not functional, not looking well and not allowing for easy and clear access, then the content’s value drops rapidly. Web designer has not only to make a site appealing to the eye, he has to make sure the search engines (crawlers) can access the site and assess on what it is for and what topic does it cover so the site itself can be listed as a search result. Web designer is a coder as much as a designer, and while there are solo web designers, they usually work in pairs or in threes, sharing the responsibilities and work load.
What do you exactly need to be a web designer. Well, first of all, you need to understand the basic coding language online, HTML and it wouldn’t hurt to know some of it’s expansions (XHTML). This is an easy part, as HTML itself has only some basic commands, and you shouldn’t expect to spend more then a week getting familiar with that language. A solid knowledge of CSS script language is also something every web designer should have in his sleeve, as that is what makes a site look pretty good in all of the browsers. Speaking of browsers, code and design optimisation take up a lot of time of a web designer – internet explorer, Chrome, Firefox and many more display some components of a web site differently, so you have to be prepared to optimize the site for all of those browsers if you want to get a well paid web designer job.
These two are nearly the basics, there are other things that you can work on if you want to really broaden your options. Knowing PHP, SQL, Java, knowing how to work in photo design and so on – all of these things complement your basic skill set on the way to becoming a web designer.