A beginner’s Guide to a Successful Web Designing Career

Websites have always been something I like a lot and I still do presently. I know you really love them as well and wished you could build your own from scratch. When I was a teenager, I always stared at beautiful websites and the ones that I loved most was websites with some animations and image sliders. One day I decided to learn about how to build a website. I encounter a lot of difficulties. I didn’t know where start or begin and ended up learning stuffs which were old and no longer necessary for building today’s standard websites.

Fortunately for you as my visitor, I’m going to provide you with the necessary things you need to know to be able to learn web designing on your own with ease.

Most people always ask this questions – what is a websites and why do I need to have a website for my business or for personal reasons. Website is just a collection of web pages. Owning a website for personal reasons or for business purpose is a very valuable asset you can obtain very easily. Learning how to build and design a successful website is not difficult at all. It requires patience, creativity and understanding.

Why do I need a website?

Many companies and small businesses are investing heavily in getting known on the web. It is estimated that more 3 billion people use the internet according to the data provide by internet live stats. These people are the clients and customers these companies and small businesses are searching for.

Making your presence known on the web can help you market your products and services to a larger segment of people. Companies like Amazon and Best Buy are able to sell their products to a wide number of people across different continents online through their website.

Many professionals like marketers and web designers are able to reach out to many clients who are in need of their services through their online portfolio. They setup these website portfolio to showcase the experiences and services they can offer in their various professional field.

You can also start your own business using a website. Mark Zuckerberg built Facebook to allow users to make and connect with friends online. Setting up Facebook as his business, he is making billions of dollars every year.

What kind of programming language do I need to learn in order to design and build my own website?

In the web designing world the programming languages you need to know are HTML, CSS and JavaScript. These are the basic languages for building a standard website. It’s best if study these languages before touching on other frameworks and libraries like jQuery, Anjular.js, React.js Bootstrap and Skeleton used for designing and building websites. Now going to show you the various functions HTML, CSS and JavaScript play in websites.

Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML)

Hyper Text Markup Language or HTML for short is the language used for building the structure of a web page. This language is made of markups or tags which allows web designers create the structure of a page. There many versions of HTML but the latest which I will recommend you to learn is HTML5.
html image
image 99robots.com

HTML should be the first language to learn if you really want to be a web designer. The introduction of HTML5 has made web designing simple and straightforward. HTML5 has got a short declaration which allows designers to remember easily, has included new tags like the audio and video tags which allows web designers to add audio and videos files to their web pages without relying on buggy flash.

A standard HTML5 document looks like this

<!doctype html>
          <html>
                    <head>
                                               
                      </head>
                       <body>
                               
                       </body>
           </html>

The first line of code <!doctype html> is the document type declaration. This code tells the browser which version of HTML to display. The second line of code marks the beginning of the HTML document. It has an opening tag <html> and a corresponding closing tag </html>. Any tag you wish to include on your web page must be written in between the open and closing tag. The third tag <head> play a very important role and must not be excluded.

This tag also has an opening tag <head> and a closing tag </head>. The head tag contains useful tags like the title tag, Meta tags, style tag, script tag and many more.  Don’t too much about these tags or markups. I will provide some useful resource to help study and understand them easily. The body tag also allows web designers to create the contents of the web pages. The paragraph tag, list tag, heading tag and many other tags must be declared within the body tag.

Cascading Style Sheet (CSS)

Once you have the structure in place, there must be some means to make them look attractive. That’s the role of CSS. With CSS you can style your web pages the way you want. CSS allows web designers to add background colors or images to their web pages, change the color of text, build navigation bars, design web pages in columns, and create good looking buttons and other interesting things. The latest version of CSS – CSS3 even give designer more power to create web pages with animation effects.
css image
image credit cssnewbie.com


A CSS style looks like this
p{
                color: blue;
                font-family: Verdana;
}

The above CSS style rule simply selects any paragraph tag on your html Document and then changes its default tex color which is black to blue and later, it changes it font to Verdana.
HTML and CSS are not difficult to learn within a month or less you should be able to build your own web pages.  Some resources to help you study HTML5 and CSS3 include

1. Head First HTML and CSS by Elisabeth Robson and Eric Freeman
This is a great book to read and I have used it before.

JavaScript

JavaScript is a client-side scripting programming language. JavaScript breathes some life into your web pages. JavaScript makes your web pages respond to actions triggered by visitors such as clicking, scrolling, resizing the browser window and using the mouse wheel. JavaScript enables web designers to create image sliders, validate data submitted by web visitors, create shopping carts, serve ads to visitors, and develop web games.

javascript image
image credit santiagomontesinos.com

Though the programming language may seem to be difficult to learn at first glance. Preparing yourself and working hard can help you overcome any struggle you may face.
Some valuable resource to help master JavaScript include

4. Eloquent JavaScript
Another great book I always enjoy reading.

Conclusion

Web designing is very broad and new trends are developed to help designers code efficiently. It’s best to start from the grassroots before moving to different aspects of web designing. Have some time to study web designing very well. Don’t rush to learn everything within a short period or else you will mess up greatly. Patience and hard work can help you become a great web designer. If you have any comment or suggestion let me know by submitting it as a comment below.

Thanks for reading.

2 comments

Thanks admin for sharing this useful info about web design , after read your blog fresher may get idea on web designing. Keep on sharing such an useful info with us.
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