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If you love spending time on the Internet, have dedicated your free time to social media applications, and love the idea of creating the web pages similar to those you most admire from any HP desktop computers or laptops, becoming a web designer may be perfect for you. Web design requires a unique set of skills and talents, some of which are contradictory. You will need to be creative and flexible in order to produce exciting designs, but you will also need the attention to detail and the ability to learn hard and fast “rules” in HTML and CSS coding. You’ll need a love of color and typography, but you will also need to be able to keep it simple enough so that your design is not distracting from the actual content. In short, you need to be a technical artist.
While there are a number of programs available to assist with creating web pages, you will still need to learn the actual coding behind those programs. While you can accomplish a great deal with WYSIWYG (What you see is what you get) software, being able to minutely adjust various elements is essential. The good news is that there are a number of books on both types of coding, and you can also find helpful, free tutorials on the Internet. Once you have the basics under your belt, you can move on to learning other tools like Flash and JavaScript. These are the utilities that really bring websites to life.
Now that you have the technical knowledge behind you, start building. Create a few dummy websites in order to try out color palettes, fonts and other design elements. Offer to build a few free websites for your friends. Use what you have learned to create your own professional portfolio website, where you showcase your work for prospective clients. You will want to make sure your best efforts appear here, since this will be the first exposure to your skills for most clients.
