Every successful professional had one strategy in common; to constantly learn and improve. There has not been a single great, whatever the profession, who called it the day after a reaching a certain point in their career. This holds true for a profession such as web designer, the success of which is very much dependent on your ability to stay up to date and relevant.
Here are the five essential improvements you should invest in to up your existing web design skills.
1. Learn SEO Techniques
Most web designers do not consider SEO as their prerogative and therefore are mostly unaware of what a SEO friendly design is. However, the most in-demand designers are those who create websites that are built search engine friendly bottoms up. Moreover, a site which is uncrawlable by the Google bots is no good for clients. Thus, knowing what works in favour of search engine rankings and visibility is a must for every web designer. If you are a freelance web designer with good SEO knowledge, clients will love the fact that they won’t have to hire a separate guy for doing the search engine optimization. Similarly, if you add these skills to your resume, it is surely going to hit with more recruiters than your peers, providing you more financial compensation in return.
2. Know JavaScript
Many web designers mull over the fact that learning additional languages are worth the time and efforts or not. However, the future clearly belongs to professionals who have expertise in at least one of the major web development languages. JavaScript is quickly becoming that one language that belongs more to web designer than web developers. In most probability, you also must have noticed the frequent mentions it gets along with HTML and CSS in various designer-talks, discussions, seminars and forums. It is therefore not hard to guess that learning the basics of JavaScript is one of the major improvements you can invest in.
3. Know responsive web design
Mobile is ruling the technology scenario. Most industries are getting affected by this paradigm shift & Internet is one of the first in this series. As more and more users move from desktop to the mobile for accessing web and search, clients are now increasingly demanding websites which perform as well on a mobile device as on a desktop. Responsive web design is the technique to ensure the same. By learning the principles of responsive web design one can create websites that work on a range of devices, conforming to their screen resolutions and sizes. In fact, knowledge of RWD is an indispensable requirement for the next generation web designer.
4. Know back-end development
Although many designers would disagree, but in the intensely competed job market the lines are fast blurring between web developers and web designers. While on one hand many PHP jobs require the candidate to have knowledge of HTML5, CSS3 and designing software like Adobe Photoshop, similarly, there is a growing majority of designer jobs that require candidates to be well versed with backend development technologies like MySQL, PHP, phpMyAdmin and others. MySQL is a database, PHP is the most widely used backend scripting language while phpMyAdmin is a tool written in PHP intended to handle the administration of MySQL over the WWW. It is not essential to become an expert in these technologies, certainly not on the expense of your web designing time, but if you dedicate a little of your time on learning them, your future is certainly bright.
5. Remain in the loop of latest trends
Although it is not advisable to solely rely on the knowledge of trends for advancing in this field, but learning new trends is a great way to keep up with the technology and to keep you out of a rut. Keeping a tab on the latest trends will help you create designs that are modern and current.
You might want to read more about digital job trends.