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Future Skills for a Budding Web Designer?
ericdfields asks: "One of my lifetime career goals is to establish myself on some decent level or another as a well-rounded, (mostly) standards-based web designer with some backroom web development knowhow. The problem is I have no clue where to begin. HTML, CSS, JavaScript are an obvious start, but what about other web-driven languages? PHP, XML, SQL, Perl... the list goes on. Should I be looking to grab hold of some Flash and Director skills? What abilities will be needed on the horizon that I can get an early start on learning today?"
Make sure that you have a good grasp of graphic design and layout/text editing. The best web-designers know more than just the techincal skills, they also know what a good looking page is supposed to look like. Most people are surprised that there are real and time-tested design standards. Violate them and no amount of techincal knowledge will make a webpage look good.
would you want that as a career? The only career I can see shrinking as rapidly is the support centre phone operative.
Daniel
Carpe Diem
I'm going to assume by "designer" you really mean a graphic designer, and not a web developer. That is, you'll be greating the UI and maybe putting together the pages, but not doing heavy development.
If that's true, I'd say the most important thing you can learn is what a dynamic site does. Understand that content will grow/shrink depending on the database at that moment and make sure your design can accomodate that.
I've been developing web sites for close to 10 years now and the ones that are the hardest are those where the designer thinks of a web page like a magazine page and doesn't understand that things stretch/shrink/flow.
That said, I'd also learn as much as you can about *how* the backend languages work (PHP, XML, etc.) but you don't need to know the specifics. But if you understand the relationships and their capabilities you'll be your developers best friend.
JavaScript, used correctly, is good. Look at all the compliments Google gets on GMail and Google Suggest or what people are doing with unobtrusive DHTML.
If anything you should be encouragine this guy to write good JavaScript so you don't have to put up with the bad stuff.
Why can't I moderate something "Wrong" or at least "Grossly Misinformed"?
HTML is a must. Learn it from the w3schools website - their tutorial rocks. Also check out XHTML, and see if you can conform to the standard in everything you write, whether it is required by your job or not. Standard conformity is a good way to save yourself when all the browsers in the world render differently.
CSS is good to know, BUT: most of the time, a company will have a CSS template that they use over all their web pages. Sometimes you'll just have to include this template in your HTML (a one tag thing), and sometimes you'll have to edit it a bit. If you ever have to make your own, a quick look at the above website will help you do it immediately (if you can already do HTML, CSS makes a lot of sense), although I wouldn't focus on it initially.
ASP (& VB), JSP (& Java), PHP (& Perl). Most companies are going to be tied to one of these three. The best thing to do is be a beginner at all of them - take a look at sample code from all six - and then become an expert on the job. My current employers (a university) are tied into Microsoft products, and politics (and other interesting financial things) keep them from changing. However much I would like them to move over to LAMP, I'm not going to sit and mope and lose my job. THUS, I code in ASP with Microsoft SQL-Server, and write VB programs for another section of my department. Be flexible. Don't assume you'll get to use your language of choice, wherever you work. Sometimes conditions prohibit it.
Learn SQL. Forget all this "learn MySQL" stuff. The connection to the database is generally something you'll write in 30 secs - with some template somewhere - and the SQL code to actually query and update that database is going to be the important, life-changing stuff. Learn SQL. On that note, if you're planning on being more of a back-end web developer (like me), learn database management. Learn how relational databases work. Learn how JOINs are your friend, and multiple relations (or tables) are a good thing. Ugly database code kills me.
And, to take a note from Joel yesterday, know how to communicate. Most web designers - the people who will be giving you changes that you absolutely must make or they'll die of horror at that color scheme - are art or design majors who have the elite thing going just like most of us programmers. Learn how to talk, how to listen, how to accept someone else's decisions when you don't have the power to make them - yet.
If you're planning on being back-end, there's a lot of other stuff you might need to know: how virtual directories work, how IIS sets up ASP applications, how Apache's configuration file works, how home directories are transferred over, how server scripting actually works, how to lock down a web server, etc. But if you have a good grasp on the above, and you stay flexible, you should be ok in the job market.
(That, and having all those acronyms on your resume will get people hooked if you can actually confirm your knowledge!)
I [may] disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.
One of my lifetime career goals is to establish myself on some decent level or another as a well-rounded, (mostly) standards-based web designer with some backroom web development knowhow.
Lifetime goal? Either you're twelve years old, or you're setting your sights really, really, really low. Or both.
Web design used to be tough a long, long time ago. These days, saying that you're going to be a well-rounded web designer is like saying you're going to be a well-rounded word processor user or desktop publisher. Off-the-shelf tools like Dreamweaver can produce web code more than good enough to get by. The challenge is no longer the tool, but the content: businesses have a greater need to put together sensible content that users want to consume, rather than just putting together a well-formatted web site.
If you want to build a set of lifetime career goals, get a role model and ask them what skills they use in their daily job. Don't make the mistake of asking them how they got their start, because lots of us got started in web design because it was tough ten years ago. It's not tough anymore, and it's not a great place to start now.
If you want to make money on the web, don't get started with design - get started with content. Find a subject that you're an expert on, and build out your content using any run-of-the-mill web site management system like Plone or Xoops. Forget getting good at HTML - any monkey can do that. Get good at providing content that users want to return to, and then you have a shot at making money.
What's your damage, Heather?
In my capacity as a web developer, here are the software packages that I feel you should have a firm understanding of:
And now for some soft skills. First, you'll need to learn to give effective presentations. You could use Powerpoint for this, or Keynote or Impress or just print them on transparencies and put them on an overhead projector. How you do it is up to you. Will you ever need to give presentations? Not really, but effective presentations require a lot of soft skills - eye contact, graphic design, pacing, speech tones, body language - that to be skilled in presentations in general means to be skilled in a lot of other areas.
You should also familiarize yourself with colour. Learn about Pantone, just so that you know about it. Learn how colours play off each other, which colors look good on which backgrounds. Learn about bordering, whitespace, balance, and form. Consider the Pantone Guide to Communicating with Color - out of 61 reader reviews, it got 4.5/5 stars, and is a good place to start.
Learn about logos. How companies make logos, and why. What goes into making a logo, subconscious suggestions from logos (there's a reason Playboy picked a bunny for their logo, and it's not obvious). This will help in your graphic design and page layout.
Learn about accessibility and colour-blindness.
I'm probably missing a ton of important stuff, but if you do it right and are willing to learn (and posting on slashdot seems to imply that), you'll probably learn what you need to know as you go. If not, just come back and post another Ask Slashdot.