Top 10 Must-Have Professional Skills For Web Designers

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Skills For Web Designers

Whether you’re just starting out as a web designer or web developer, or looking to make a career change and become a web expert, you need to have a few key skills if you want to succeed in this industry. The following list of skills for web designers, both technical and otherwise, represents some of the key areas of knowledge that you should add to your portfolio as your career progresses.

Professional Skills For Web Designers

HTML Code Presented On A Page

The hypertext markup language is the foundation of website building. It’s one of the most important things a web designer or developer can learn, which is why it’s one of the first things you’ll learn. Even if you intend to use WYSIWYG (meaning what you see is what you get) editors or a CMS for most of your career, knowing HTML will allow you to understand how. how these tools work and will give you more control over your work. This knowledge will also ensure that if you need to work outside of these editors, you have the ability to do so.

Even if they don’t use it in normal work, they still understand this basic markup language. CSS stylesheets arranged on a page While HTML governs the structure of web pages, Cascading Style Sheets manage their visual appearance. As such, CSS is another essential tool that web designers – especially front-end designers and developers – need to learn.

For many web professionals, CSS is learned alongside HTML, because the two languages ​​are really the combination that forms the basis of any website’s structure and style.

Design Meaning

Having a good sense of design is important for web professionals who are more of a “designer” category. There’s more to web design than just knowing which colors go well together. You need to know the design elements as well as the basic design principles and best practices of typography, use of images, layout principles, and more. You will also need to understand how real people will interact with a design so you can make the right decisions to meet the needs of that site.

While design skills are never a bad thing, more focused professionals as web developers don’t need those skills much unless they’re working as freelancers and responsible for all aspects of website building (meaning they don’t work with a separate department).

JavaScript and Ajax

JavaScript is an important interactive element of a website and web developers should familiarize themselves with JavaScript before learning other languages, especially how it interacts with HTML and CSS to create 3 layers of design. 

Web designers don’t need to learn JavaScript unless they’re also developing user interfaces — and even then, a basic understanding of JavaScript is often more than enough. Web developers should learn JavaScript as it plays an important role in many websites and web applications today. Anyone involved in back-end development can be very comfortable with JavaScript.

JavaScript works with XML files and communicates asynchronously with the web server through a method called Ajax. With Ajax, web pages load faster and various embedded objects can be updated without requiring a full page reload.

PHP, ASP, Java, Perl, or C++

Learning how to program websites requires you to learn at least one or two programming languages. PHP easily leads the way on the web today, in part because it is an open-source language that has a strong community acceptance. If you only choose one language to learn, it should be PHP. The number of resources that you will find online for PHP will be very helpful to you.

Web designers don’t need to learn any programming language (other than HTML, which is a markup language, not a pure programming language). Web developers should learn at least one, and the more you know, the more employable and flexible you will be.

Want to make yourself super valuable? Finding ways to learn languages ​​is still in demand, but few people learn them today. If you master these languages, you will find that there may not be many career opportunities for this skill, but the ones that do exist are hard to fill, which means you will be an asset.

Mobile Support

On the web today, there are many types of devices and screen sizes used. To achieve this, websites need to support these many types of user devices with responsive websites designed for this multi-device world.

The ability to design websites that look great in different sizes and also write media queries to create responsive websites is essential for today’s web professionals.

Mobile goes far beyond responsive websites. If you can develop mobile apps, especially those that interface with websites, you will be very attractive in our increasingly mobile-centric world. The line between web developer and application developer is blurring year by year. It is one of the key skills for web designers to add to their portfolios.

SEO

Search engine optimization, or SEO, is very useful for anyone who builds a website. Several factors affect a website’s search engine ranking, from its content to inbound links, download speed and performance, and mobile compatibility. All of these are elements that a web designer should keep in mind and know how to use to make a website more appealing to tools and easier for customers to find. It is one of the essential skills for web designers to learn.

Web designers and web developers will have more attractive resumes if they know at least the basics of SEO. While the unconditional application of this skill is intended for marketing professionals, knowing the basics of SEO is a great thing in your hat.

Web Server Administration

Knowing at least a little bit about the web server your website is running on can help you troubleshoot and make your site perform better. Most web designers believe that they can ignore the server, but if you know how the server reacts to things, you can create a better website, as well as a better website from a different perspective. 

Project management

Project management is an essential job skill in almost every industry, and web design is no exception. Project management skills help you get a project off to a good start, keep it on track, and ensure its success. This methodological rigor will make you loved by all the managers you work with. It will also help you transition into more team leader roles as you look to advance your career.

Web designers and web developers will benefit from the knowledge of project management. Whether you work in an agency or are a freelance web designer, project management is an extremely useful skill. In most cases, you will use a flexible approach, but other sensible project management models, such as waterfalls, are often used by very large enterprise clients.

SQL

A structured query language is a scripting tool that interfaces with a database. While most web designers won’t use SQL, many web developers will – and even for designers, understanding the basics of relational database queries helps to Report design choices and reduces rework and confusion for developers.