Working in the web development industry is a rush. It is evolving quickly, it’s growing, it’s exciting and there are so many disciplines and opportunities.
Twelve years, and I am as excited about what I do as the first day I started.
Where once it took only a designer and a programmer to build a website, modern websites involve dozens of different skills: from analysts to information architects (IA), to producers to interface designers, to user testers and programmers, to online marketers and web masters.
Not to speak of the people that host the website, register its domain and the people that develop the rich content. The list goes on and on.
One of the more difficult questions I am asked is how one starts a career in web design and development. It’s difficult to answer for a few reasons:
1. There are just so many facets and specialisations in our industry, that simply wishing to be a designer doesn’t cut it.
Without some experience or knowledge of how websites are developed and marketed, it is hard to pinpoint where one might start.
To exacerbate the issue, specialisation is the way to go – the more specialised you are, the more you’ll earn. Jack-of-all-traders are common in web design, though they’re much better in management and strategy/advisory roles rather than implementation roles.
2. Depending on the area of web design and development you want to get into, depends on the training, or course you might do. And without knowing what exactly you’re going to do, you can’t know what course to do… A Catch 22.
So how to resolve this dilemma? Here’s my five tips:
- Make sure you have a passion for web design and development. Keeping up your skills and knowledge is critical, and if you’re not attune to keeping up because web design is just a job for you, you’ll quickly fall behind.
- Spend some time reading online about how modern website development works. Try making your own blog; write a specification, determine the features you want, design it, slice it, build it, produce some great content and optimise it for search engines and social networks.You’ll soon find out what you like and what you are good at.
- Do a course. Designers with formal training have skills in typography and colour, and much needed art online.
Developers that are trained are disciplined, know how to plan their projects and write logical databases. Enterprise web development is an art in itself, and courses teach that.
- Learn about usability. It might seem an odd point, though making an amazing looking and functioning website that is unusable and frustrating defeats the point of building the website in the first point. It happens constantly, and getting a good grounding in what is important in website will steer you clear of bad temptations and habits.
- Try and travel. Many of the great designers and developers I know have travelled. I have some great friends that are analysts and strategists, and they all went to London or France or New York and gained much from it. Australia is an unquestioned leader in web design and development, though we can learn a lot from our peers overseas.
And this all adds up to value you can earn from.
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