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The age of the internet has opened up many possibilities for companies to grow exponentially. And so, businesses are trying to expand their online presence through a professional custom web design. That explains the surge of web designing courses in mainstream vocational education. However, it is not necessary to get a degree or formal education to be a web designer. You have to be intuitive with your vision and creativity. Following are the top skills that you will need to make it big as a web designer, even without a degree.
Visual Designing
The main expectation your client will have from you is to design a visually beautiful and appealing website. While displaying the theme of the business, the website should be able to attract visitors with its look and feel. It requires the necessary design knowledge to play with the proportions, grid systems, typography, and other website principles. On the brighter side, this is the area where you can be genuinely creative and try out various web designing tools.
UI & UX
UI and UX mean User Interface and User Experience, respectively. While UI is the website’s layout, look, and feel, the UX shows how a user perceives the UI. Both are significant components of web designing. To carry out the process, the designers create personas that are essentially the profiles of imaginative visitors. The goal is to figure out the paths users take on the UI of the website. Then, the UX design is modified to provide the users the result they came looking for on the website. A web designer must always take these elements into consideration.
HTML & CSS
HTML is an essential skill that a web designer must have to design a functional website. It stands for HyperText Markup Language and is used as a coding language to structure the content on web pages. From text to media, if you can code it in HTML, you can put it on a website. CSS expands to Cascading Style Sheets. It is the code to direct the format and styling of HTML for a web page to the browser. CSS is used to add the creative factor in the content that is put up with HTML. The web designer has a free hand to design the webpage with these two coding languages.
Additionally, you can also learn JavaScript to make the website more interactive through image sliders, automatic updates, and so on.
Major Designing Tools
Web designing is more than just writing codes. You need to develop expertise or intermediary proficiency in basic designing tools like Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, and Sketch. While this software will not help with a website’s technicalities, you can do mockups of logos and images using them. However, you shall not necessarily buy them. Free photoshop alternatives are handy and can be used to create the required designs. After trying your hand on them, you can move to more advanced software with a general idea of using them efficiently.
SEO & SMM
Skills like Search Engine Optimization and Social Media Marketing are not directly related to web designing. These are marketing strategies to sell a product or experience to a seller on the online platform. As a web designer, you would need to sell your services to the clients who are actively looking for them. In this competitive era, it makes sense to have a sales-orienting skill set. After getting clients, you can also offer them consultancy on digital marketing to open an extra income line.
Time Management
Time Management is an important soft skill on our list for numerous reasons. You can develop other professional skills, like business management and client communication, over time. However, time management is something you need to master before setting up your career goals. A good start will be organizing your daily schedule and focusing on time management. It’s okay if you do not keep up with the plan in the beginning. This habit will benefit you ahead in your professional life when the number of responsibilities increases.
Conclusion
Web designing is a growing profession. It does not require a degree, but a range of skills that you can master with perseverance and creativity only. If you want to tap the heights of success as a web designer, keep an open mind for learning and an open eye for opportunities.
