Breaking into Web Design — A Beginner’s Guide

When you start a new hobby, interest, or career there is no doubt that as easy as it seems to be able to do it at first sight, it actually isn’t. Whether you grow an interest for knitting, wood crafting, drawing, writing, or Web Design – They are all much harder to accomplish than they seem. But let’s not allow this to put us off learning or taking up anything new, especially Web Design. There are many aspects of the Web industry that one may be interested in learning about and “breaking into” but in this article I’m going to go through what it takes to break into the Web Design industry as a beginner / hobbyist and I also aim to guide you in the right direction of developing your technical skills. On we go!

What You Need to Know

When you start out as a beginner and you want to design your first Website there are a number of different subject areas that you must have basic beginner knowledge and skills in so you can design, develop, and produce an effective Website that you’ll be happy with. The following are skills that you’ll need to know a little bit about to get you started:

• Web Design (theory, concepts, and principles)
• Accessibility
• Usability
• Search Engine Optimization
• Typography
• Front-End Web Development (HTML, CSS, JS)
• Back-End Web Development (PHP & MySQL, ASP.NET, Ruby on Rails, etc)
• Web Hosting

As you can see Web Design isn’t just two words – It splits into a multi-disciplinary subject that requires at least a basic beginner level knowledge in each so you can be well equipped to produce a Website that will be on par with today’s Web standards.

The Path of Learning Basic Web Design

To start off with though you really only ought to know the basic theory, concepts, and principles behind designing a Website and then you’ll need knowledge in HTML and CSS to be able to produce the Website that you’ve designed, so with that in mind, here is the path I advise that you take in beginning to learn Web design.

1. Web Design (theory, concepts, and principles)
2. HTML
3. CSS
4. JS
5. Web Hosting

The above five are the most crucial elements of a basic Website. You’ll need to have the basic beginner level knowledge and techniques to be able to design a Website (even if it is just a 5 page static Website), you’ll then require knowledge of basic HTML and CSS in order to develop your design into a fully functional Website, and in addition to this basic functionality if you require any user experience enhancements then you’ll need to know how to code and manipulate JavaScript. Finally, after you’ve designed, developed, and produced your Website and it’s ready to go live on the Internet and World Wide Web you’ll then need to find a Web hosting service provider to upload your Website files to so everyone in the World can view your glorious Website.

Where to Next

There are so many different inter-disciplinary subjects that you must learn within the Web industry that you couldn’t begin to learn all of them at the same time which is why I have produced the basic and short learning path list above to help guide you in the creation of your first basic Website. In the next article I’ll be helping you to develop your first basic Website using HTML 4.01 and CSS 2.1 and as usual if you need any help then you can visit the SoDevious forums or leave a comment.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/istylr/3776831893/in/photostream/