A good web designer must possess a minimum set of skills in order to connect all the technology and create a fully integrated website. First, a good background in design is essential because he must be able to create something with a look and feel that is pleasing to the eye. However, a website is more than just something pretty to look at. There is a lot that goes on behind the scenes, and a web designer needs to have expertise in those things as well. Read this article to find out what else a good web designer needs to know.
Every website has its own unique address on the Internet. This is known as the website’s domain. A typical web designer who has designed many websites will need to know how to manage these multiple domains for his many clients. He needs to how to acquire and register a domain for his client. Once a domain is acquired, he will need to populate it with pages and content that he will create for his client. There are issues about uploading and backing up files for each of these domains. There may be tools that need to be installed within each domain. Email under this domain will need to be configured for his client. The web designer has to know how to do all of this.
Part of the foundation of every web page is the HTML code that marks up the content. Although many web designers are now using templates as start to creating any new website, you will still need to know this basic code in order to customize the template to your specs. Not knowing HTML will limit you to using the templates as they come.
The other part of the foundation is the cascading stylesheets, or CSS. This affects how your content will look on the web page. You need to know the latest CSS standards in order take advantage of how the modern browsers display web pages. There is whole consortium, called the World Wide Web Consortium, or W3C, who sets these standards in the industry. As a good designer, you should stay up to date with the latest updates so that the websites that you create will always be compliant to standards.
In the old days, a web page is created by hand-coding the HTML and CSS. Nowadays, there are many web authoring tools on the market that can help you do the coding quickly without hand-coding every character. These tools usually have the most popular web page features pre-coded so you do not have to insert the tags in one by one. Examples are things like a table or a form. Although web authoring tools can save you time in coding, you still should know how the code is derived so that you can tweak it to fit the look that you want. You should learn the advanced features of whatever tool you are using to code. This will help you create web pages more efficiently.
These things are some of the basic skills that all web designers need to have. There are many others. The more web design skills you build up, the more marketable your web design services will be.