Web design is a very broad field, hosting a couple of other subdivisions within it. Being a web designer requires mastery of these many sections so as to diversify the services offered to clients. In this article, we look at some of the essential services every web developer should be able to provide to their customers.
Skills Every Web Designer Should Have
Image Manipulation
Image manipulation is a critical skill for any web designer to have. In most work scenarios, most of the websites requested by clients need to have several images for aesthetics and information conveyance. Knowing how to crop, resize, and color manipulation among another plethora of image editing skills is necessary; in that it makes images match or play nicely with other parts of the website. Basic knowledge of applications like Photoshop or Gimp is essential for the everyday web designer.
PSD To HTML
In the website creation ecosystem, chances are you will have to collaborate with graphic designers. Graphic designers often design websites on their graphic design apps. Clients often buy these designs, in PSD format, a file extension given to images created in Photoshop. The PSD’s are then presented to web designers so that they can be coded to HTML so as to be rendered in every web browser. Most graphic designers are better at designing interfaces compared to web designers, and the chances are that clients will buy interfaces from them and give them to web designers for conversion. PSD to HTML is a useful skill that every serious web designer should have.
CMS
A CMS is a Content Management System. In most cases, a web designer’s work is to design the presentation of a website using graphic design applications or the markup language HTML. But in recent years, CMS’s have come into play, allowing the creation of dynamic websites in a few minutes. These CMS’s, for example, Word Press or Joomla, have their presentation layers called themes or templates. Knowing how to work with their templating layers to make custom designs collaborate with the system is paramount. Most clients will need CMS based websites with custom themes to create uniqueness.
Basic PHP
Typically reserved for web developers, PHP is a s
erver-side programming language. In most cases, web designers will not interact with this programming language. The advent of CMS’s, however, introduces the need for designers to learn basic PHP. While designing CMS themes, some sections require PHP, for example, to automatically show the year in the section that displays copyright information. In most cases, major CMS’s provide guidelines to do such stuff but learning Basic PHP will come in handy for most projects.