How to Sharpen Your Skills

  • Make a Bunch of Websites
  • Always be Practicing
  • Give and Recieve Feedback
  • Participate in Design Competitions
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HTML & CSS

Coding Effeciently

You need to understand how to read, edit and troubleshoot basic HTML. You should be able to pinpoint a bold or font or color or size issue in HTML without thinking. You should be able to substitute styles in CSS with ease. These are skills that are easy to learn and will serve you well in the long run.

Using Frameworks

Frameworks keep you from reinventing the wheel with every project and are easy for others to use if you are ultimately handing a website over to a client that will try to maintain it and make updates. WordPress is a popular option, but there are plenty of others out there to try.

Javascript

While you can code up your designs using just HTML and CSS, if you can also program using JavaScript, you’ll have a huge leg up against the competition. JavaScript allows you to take static elements on your site and make them interactive—think: Twitter feeds that update automatically, websites that look different when you’re logged in, image sliders, and more!

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UX/ UI Design

Site Map

A sitemap lists the pages of a website, organized by importance, so search engines know which URLs to crawl and index. The Internet currently has over 30 trillion webpages available to readers. Google crawls all of these pages and attempts to give users the best results to their search queries. Because there are so many pages online, it is important to make this indexing process as easy as possible for search engines like Google.

Don't Make User Think

The more time it takes a user to find out how to use your website, the quicker they will leave. Having a good navigation in place will allow the user to go through your site without even thinking about it.

User Personas

Personas are vital to the success of a product because they drive design decisions by taking common user needs and bringing them to the forefront of planning before design has actually started. Personas provide the team with a shared understanding of users in terms of goals and capabilities.

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Good Design

Typography

What font you choose can say a lot about the design. You must make sure you match the type of fonts to the overall attitude of the website. Also that the fonts chosen pair up to look like some thought went into it and not just thrown together with whatever font you felt like having.

Color

Color is at the heart of web design because it helps to establish the theme and motif of any effective design. In addition, it also works on the psychological, where colors influence how a site visitor views his user experience.

Flow

Flow is a reference to a site visitor’s visual movement as he experiences the website. Flow includes the proper use of depth, color, hierarchy, shapes and lines. Flow tools include perspective, spacing and facial direction.

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Using Design Software

Create Assets

You will want to be able to create things such as logos and images for your projects.

Understanding the Software

Like any craftsperson, to do your work, you’ll have to the right tools. And knowing your way around the industry standards will be helpful in any case and critical in many. While designing a site can be done right in a web browser now, tools like Photoshop and Sketch are ones that almost all designers use for important parts of their job like creating mockups, modifying and enhancing photos.

Style Tiles

Creating style tiles are a crucial way to give a quick mockup of what your website might look like to the client. In order for them to see what they like or don't like about it. So that if you need to change something, it won't take you all day.

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Project Management

Planning Out Projects

Whether you go freelance or work for a company, you’ll need to stay on top of your schedule and your projects to be a standout web designer. This can mean getting to know productivity apps like task lists or calendars or, especially if you’re in a large organization, learning project tracking tools like Trello or JIRA. Whatever the tools, mastering the art of prioritizing and tracking your work will be essential for your success (and sanity!) in the busy world of web design.

Proper File Structure

Be sure to have files and folders set up with a proper naming structure to ensure that the code can be read easily.

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Good Communication

Staying in Touch

Staying in touch and getting your point across are also must-have skills for a designer. You’ll be keeping clients up-to-date on the progress of their projects plus pitching ideas and explaining your creations. And you might even be called on to do some copywriting or editing for sites, especially if you’re running your own one (wo)man shop. So, buckle down on your writing and your speaking, and you’ll be sure to get your point across in every situation.

Be a Team Player

Web designing is rarely a one-man show. Whether you work in a big design studio or with a small client, team work is inevitable. While a web designer’s work does not require a large team of professionals (in many cases it can feel like you're working all alone), it's important to understand just how often your ability to work with others and delegate tasks will come into play over the course of a project.

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Constant Learning

Following Trends

One big reason to always be open to learning more is the fact that new trends are always emerging in web design. Just think of the stuff that’s been talked about in the last few years: parallax scrolling, then flat design and now, Material Design. In design, learning is ongoing. You never stop learning, so you can always be on top of the latest trends, which just makes you nicely well-rounded as a designer.

Evolving with the Web

The phrase “There’s always better” is what you should live by as a web designer. You can always learn new things that will impress your clients, expand your creativity and skills and generally improve your passion for design.