Top Skills Required to Be a Successful Web Designer

CNBC published an April 16, 2019 report of 10 highest-paying entry-level jobs in the tech field. One of the top 10 is the UI/UX designer job. The average salary is $84,841. Choosing a career in web design would be a wise move. But what are the web design skills you need to learn to get a promising job?

This article will take you through pertinent web design skills that you should acquire.

Essential Web Designer Skills for High-Paying Jobs

To become a creative web designer, you will greatly benefit from learning a web design course. Your skills toward becoming a web designer include the following,

1) Mastering UX Design

UX means user experience or how users feel when they interact on a website. Bringing about better user experiences depends on two things. They are, you should know what is the intention of your website and what the user wants from the website.

A good user experience will make visitors stay on your page. Another important aspect is how fast the web page loads and to what extent it is responsive towards different devices and computer screen sizes. Furthermore, easy navigability also adds to the enhancement of user experience.

2) Essential Design Tools

As a web designer, you would be required to use important design software applications. You should have knowledge of tools such as Photoshop, Sketch, and Mockplus.

Photoshop is useful for coming up with image processing for graphic and web design. Adobe Illustrator is a good vector graphics processing tool. It is used for font design, graphic design, product packaging design, book/magazine layout, and illustration design.

Adobe After Effects is a graphic video processing software. Mockplus is a powerful interactive prototyping/wireframing tool.

3) Visual Design Basics

Visual design deals with digital products. Here, design principles are what determine the look and feel of a site. To put it simply, visual design is about creating mood boards and type hierarchies. It also deals with experimenting with web fonts and color palettes.

4) Understanding HTML

Hypertext markup language (HTML) has to do with coding. HTML is a basic framework for all pages on the web. HTML establishes the structure and content of the page.

5) Mastering CSS

CSS is expanded as Cascading Style Sheets. CSS controls the design part of the web page. For example, with CSS you can make adjustments to colors, change fonts and add captivating backgrounds.

6) JavaScript & Ajax Skills

JavaScript is an important interactive element of a website. JavaScript is useful for both front-end and back-end developers. JavaScript works with XML files and communicates asynchronously with a web server through an approach called Ajax. Furthermore, websites load faster with Ajax and various embedded objects may update without the need for a complete page reload.

7) PHP for Web Development

PHP helps web developers and web designers. Though PHP need not be learned by web designers it is good to have a knowledge of this language. PHP is an open-source, server-side HTML-embedded scripting language used to create dynamic web pages.

8) Responsive Web Design

People have become used to small screens to view and read web page information. Therefore as a web designer, you should get a grip of the principles of responsive web design to keep your web pages readable on small screens.

9) Web Server Management

As a web designer, you cannot ignore the server. But you have to also bear in mind that the webserver and downtime issues cannot be averted. It will be good if you understand a web server and its basic features to help you solve problems faster.

10) SEO for Web Designers

SEO will be absolutely necessary for anyone building a website design. Web designers should be mindful of the content of a page, its’ inbound links, download speed, performance, and mobile-friendliness. Knowing these facts will help you to work towards making the site more attractive to search engines and easier for customers to find.

11) Digital Marketing & Social Media

If you are a web designer working in the digital marketing industry then you have to keep a lot of customer aspects in mind. Your design should be customer-friendly and highly interactive.

Soft Skills Every Web Designer Should Have

Soft skills for a web designer may sound a little bit off track. But it is not so. Soft skills play a great role in improving your work skills, maintaining relationships at the workplace and honing other designing skills. Soft skills that you should try to nurture are,

Writing & Editing Skills

You should know how to use words effectively. Furthermore, you should craft a series of web pages into a conversation that communicates what clients want and prompts the visitors to take the required actions. Effective wording is of more importance in the success of web pages.

Moreover, effective wording is key for branding, usability, and SEO.

A Holistic Design Approach

As a designer, you should take into view a whole lot of issues as mentioned below before you publish your design work. Perspective considerations are,

• Who your target visitor is?
• What do they want to achieve out of your website design?
• Competition and your differentiation
• Choice of wording
• Imagery and tone
• Taking the maximum advantage of the functioning of the search engines
• Difficulties and costs of having your design published correctly on different browsers
• Accessibility to everyone despite issues like disability, ease of use, technical integration issues, maintenance issues, brand constraints, etc.

Lifelong Learning & Adaptability

Technology doesn’t stand the same even for a single day. To keep up with the evolving trends you need to cultivate the habit of catching up with the recent trends in web designing.

Apart from the above soft skills, you need to have,

• Listening skills
• Project management skills
• Business/Client management
• Typing skills
• Time management
• Communication

Conclusion

Web designing that, speaks to customers, gets optimal productivity and ROI is what you need. Read through the above web design skills carefully and learn even more to get the intended project and business results.