website designer?

Question

Hi, I am wondering if anyone can tell me a little bit about been a website designer?
What sort of courses I need to be taking?
Is it hard work?
What is the wages like?
Can you work from home?
Is it hard to get work in this field?

Answer 1

You dont get paid wages, but you can charge a lot of money to set up and maintain a website. £200-£500.
It is not hard once you have done it a few times. My advise is to download a web design program and play about with it. Start of with Web East Proffessional 6, the work your way up to dreamweaver.
All the programs will allow you to preview what the page will look like on your browser without having to set up a domain name and get it hosted.

Answer 2

What sort of courses I need to be taking?
Self-taught course, the cheapest and the best. You could start with googling some free online courses.

My suggested learning path is:
Intro to WD with a WYSIWYG editor << briefly only, optional
HTML << probably would be the hardest work
XHTML+CSS << easy after learning HTML
Photoshop skills << other image programs are also accepted
WYSIWYG tools << Frontpage, Dreamweaver, Nvu, etc
Javascript
PHP (or ASP or JSP any server side script)

learning from the HTML would give you a certain edge compared to all those people that covers themself all around completely with WYSIWYG editor. Yeah, I won't forbid you from designing in WYSIWYG, but even if you edit with WYSIWYG, it is much better to know what's behind WYSIWYG and learn at least the basics first, before using WYSIWYG as your main application.

Is it hard work?
Depends on you. For some it is easy and web designing is a hobby, for other it is something that they have to force digest to pass for their grades.

What is the wages like?
Don't always think about money. The pay for being website designer is very variative, and usually a one-time-payment. If you see web designing as your future job only because of the money, then you should quit. You should see money as your side motivator, while your main motivator is your own interest of web designing.

Can you work from home?
Absolutely, as long as you have computer at home. Probably going out once in a while if the customer requires to meet face to face. You could even take jobs from across the globe if you wish. Web designing can be categorized as freelance job.

Is it hard to get work in this field?
Not really, as you could treat web design as a side job (or keep a side job) while having no order.

Answer 3

Website design can be very hard and very stressful, although you can make a lot of money from it, but you need to know how to design a workable site, using a WYSIWG will not be sufficient, as the majority of site are selling or offering a service, which you would need to know how to incorporate say a shopping basket, the best programme to use is dreamweaver, difficult but can do most things. But you also need to know about graphics as well.
the best thing to do is get yourself a template, and play around with it, (html) to start with, there are loads of scripts out there you can use to help you. if you want any more info drop me amail
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