Here's my list of the top 10 skills you need for succeeding as a web designer.
When I talk about "succeeding" I've used the following criteria:
Your priorities may be different, and my priorities may be different a few months down the line. And I’d add that you don’t need all these skills in any particular measure to make it in web design. But to be a fully rounded web professional, this is my take on the ideal make-up.
I’m convinced the #1 most important skill for a web designer is the ability to use words effectively. A truly effective web designer is more highly skilled with writing and editing copy than with producing graphics in Photoshop.
If you can craft a series of web pages into a conversation that communicates what you need to communicate, informs, and calls your visitors to take the actions you want, your web site can be a great success, even if it’s graphically plain – hey, even if it’s ugly!
Effective wording is of singular importance in several highly important factors in the success of web pages:
What I mean by this is the ability to look at a problem from multiple angles at the same time, so that you can come up with a solution that balances appropriate all the various requirements, goal, and risk factors.
Web design isn’t a simplistic publishing exercise (what is?!): it requires an appreciation of who your target visitor is, what she wants to achieve when visiting a web site, what the competition is like and how to differentiate your site from them, the initial brand impression, choice of wording to communicate effectively, choice of imagery to create the right tone, how search engines work and how to take maximum advantage of that, difficulties and cost of getting a design to display correctly on very different browsers, accessibility to everyone regardless of disability, ease-of-use, technical integration issues, maintenance issues, brand constraints, etc. etc.
On top of all this, a really good web designer has the ability to step away from the design they’re working on, almost to pretend to be someone else and think like someone who’s never seen the site before.
How can you develop this ability? I honestly don’t know for sure, but experience helps, as does the opportunity to observe people using web sites (yours or others’).
The discipline of graphic design works at many levels, from the surface effect to the core basics of layout and spacing.
I really believe that the core basics are far more important than the "higher" aspects.
The core basics include:
These basics make a design basically work. Get them right, and your design will be effective, irrespective of the finish.
At the higher end, you’ve got the actual surface layer, which sits on top of the basic structure. These skills include:
Get both right, and you can have a compelling web page design that works on every level. Get the basics right, and your page will be fundamentally effective. Get just the surface finish, and you could end up with no result at all, other than the accolades of design tossers, which really is the wooden spoon.
To be a great web designer, you need to appreciate the whole environment. The most fundamental, radical requirement is: What does the client need?
To get to the bottom of what will actually constitute success for your client, you need to apply both good listening (which is pro-active and may be challenging) and discernment – good judgement, based on experience and common sense, which will help you and the site owner refine what the site needs to achieve.
Without good listening & discernment, you’ll end up with a web site whose purpose is just to be a web site up there. That’s no good to anyone. Great designers create web sites that are consciously, deliberately, boldly focused on achieving specific goals for the client (through delivering specific benefits to visitors with consistently satisfying experiences).
While direct prior experience is a clear advantage, you can get around lack of experience in any particular industry. The way to do that is to use facilitation skills: to keep asking probing questions, and working hard to stretch your understanding to accommodate what you’re learning, and helping to simplify the client’s purpose and any concepts to the point where you get it. If you can refine any proposition to one sentence, which your client can agree is true and accurate, you’ve done a good job.
Web design is one of the richest, most diverse domains you can choose. It’s a giant pile-on of visual design, technology, psychology, coding, human factors, all that jazz. And the technology doesn’t stand still from one day so the next. That’s what makes it so frustrating – and so fun! One thing’s for sure. If you want to perform well in this mental soup, you’ve got to be capable of learning on a daily basis. You need to pick up new styles, new techniques, and new constraints every time you sit down to work.
And because it moves so quickly, there’s no one who can teach you everything. The best designers, SEO guys, CSS geeks, hackers, copywriters, businesspeople, etc. they’re all learning every day, trying out new stuff, learning what works and what doesn’t. There’s not one of them who knows it all. In this industry, the moment you think you may know enough is the moment you drop off the pace. Just like the rest of life, I guess!
That doesn’t mean you have to Can you develop this skill? Well, you have to do it constantly, really; that’s the whole point. Here are some pointers:
Optimising your pages for search engines is a vital element in web design!
Why? Because web design is the discipline of crafting effective communication. That means the whole process, end to end. And if no-one ever visits your web page, or the only people who do aren’t the ones who should, you ain’t communicating!
The first step in usability, in branding, in design – is search results. Your visitor’s experience of your site/brand begins with typing in a search term, and scanning the list of results to pick out the thing they believe is most likely to give them what they want.
If you want to be an excellent designer, you can’t ignore web page optimisation. The more I’ve learnt about this area, the more I’m thinking from the search engine’s perspective as I design a site’s information architecture, and even lay out my page designs.
What’s the sound of one hand clapping? If a tree falls in the forest with no one to hear it, does it make a sound? If no one visits your web page, is it design?
See my introduction to SEO for a starting point…
I’ve put original, creative graphics down the list from the theory of graphic design principles/basics, because I really believe you can make an effective web page without them! Not always, clearly. Some goals depend on getting a really tight, shiny, quality look. But that’s not the majority of sites, really.
There are lots of ugly sites out there that really work:
And there are lots more very simple or plain designs that deliver massive results day-in, day-out. Take ebay, Google, Wikipedia, and Craigslist for starters.
I know you’ll often get clients who are only happy when they get snazzy graphics. So you do often need to be able to pull the rabbit out of the hat, which is why this skill is in my top 10. However, it’s not entirely a necessity. As long as you’ve got enough clear vision, you can always brief someone else to do the graphics production for you, which you can’t say for all the items on this list.
I like to think that if I lost all my Photoshop skills in a bizarre drinking game, I’d still be able to turn out great web sites that transform people’s businesses.
You can clearly outsource your web page production. There’s a growing niche of companies who can do this cost-effectively. So why’s it in this list?
The reason is that designing web pages with a working knowledge of what’s possible and what’s easy using xHTML & CSS is many times more efficient than to do designs out of ignorance to the constraints of the technology through which your vision will eventually be delivered.
I’ve worked with some really good designers who come from a print background, and who create visually appealing web pages that just don’t work very well. That’s simply due to not being intimate enough with the production methods to be able to wave the mouse with markup and stylesheets already in mind.
Aside from that, understanding what’s possible and doable in HTML & CSS is vital for SEO, usability, and accessibility.
(I was going to put "usability" here, but frankly you can live without the ability to find out what actually works and what actually doesn’t. At least, you don’t have to experiment or learn this formally. You can just watch people using stuff, and learn to watch yourself as you use stuff.)
Frankly, if you’re going to make a go of being a web designer, whether you’re self-employed, freelance, part of a small company or large corporation, you’ll benefit from knowing the basics of how business works, and how to make sensible guesses when faced with business choices. If you’re responsible for creating marketing channels online for clients, however small, you’ve got to know what the purpose is. That’s all business is: common sense.
Can I sum it up in one paragraph?
The core of Business is basically Marketing: working out what people want and how to provide in a way that they choose you rather than something else or nothing.
Beyond that, it’s guesswork. There is no right answer. However, you can inform yourself a lot, by being brutally honest, creating tests & experiments and facing the facts they throw up. Even better, you can learn from other people’s tests and experiments, which is a lot less work, by reading what they’ve written and applying it sensibly to your own situations.
I’ve written a whole article on this topic. In brief, whatever you do, you’ll spend a lot of time at the keyboard. Most of my designs use more text than graphics, and all our HTML, CSS, PHP etc. are hand coded. The fact is that the faster I can type, the more stuff I get done in an hour.
If you can type fast, you can code fast, you can get your emails out of the way quicker, and you can blog or write books with the time you’ve saved.
The only reason not to learn to touch-type is if you can already type faster than you can think. Take the hit, go through the dip. Learn to type now, and feel the benefits every year to come!
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I’m sorry, but I’m really sick of hearing about the importance of SEO. Good design is much more important in my opinion. If you’ve ever read a site with good SEO you’ll know it reads like a government manual. So, if your business is writing government manuals, then you’re fine. For the rest of us I prefer good usability and attractive design, thank you.
Gern, I used to think exactly the same. I have since learned that there are 2 important things in your web site’s success: traffic and conversion. Success = Traffic x Conversion. If you have no traffic, you have no success. If your conversion rate stinks, you have no success. You can’t avoid either. Good SEO is not about making a poor user experience – that’s short-sighted. Great SEO *is* design, and marketing! It’s part of the user experience. It identifies the right target market, provides a compelling promise (in the search engine results), and brings them in to the right page. If it’s done well, it’s integral to the whole design process. Graphic design is another factor. It’s not either/or – it’s both/and. If you really want your design to succeed, get it seen and get it working great too!