I have been thinking about becoming a webdesigner in the past few month, I have designed few simple websites for friends using HTML. But it seems like to make a living as a web designer is a way of the past. AMAZON.COM offers hundreds of Template for business owners to desing their own websites, google, Aol and many more pre-desingned tempplate available, who needs a webdesigner any more. If I am wrong please let me know.

thanks

Sam

Recommended Answers

All 13 Replies

wow... you are also in that warp zone were people believe that templates are just as good so why pay more for a designer!

Difference: a template is standard and a lot of people will be using that very same template so it does not make you unique and you will loose the focus of the client. It will also not be specific to the company branding and standards. Does a template do SEO and cool little web tricks for you? It will take an advance computer literate person quite some time to figure out how to edit and add the most simple of tools with templates.

If all the websites looked the same, would any body even be bothered to look at competitors sites and find the site that works well for them? Maybe we all should also dress the same, with the same haircut, nail length and shoes. Only difference is that we are aloud to have our own hair color (that is also pre-defined to blond, brown, red and black). You are aloud to have your own thoughts but you are only aloud to use your word structure in certain ways.

For some people templates work well but for most, i would not say so.

Maybe I’m the idiot if I believe that the future is for designers as the world is still growing and there is a huge difference between someone like yourself and a professional web designer who knows the ins and outs of web design and standards.

Please feel free to go into sales, accounting and what ever else you might fancy and leave the real exciting world of web design to us

Trust me, there's still plenty need for web designers. I've worked on a large ecommerce site and I've never seen a template that would have satisfied our needs. Not too mention keeping with the company color scheme and all the behind-the-scenes work it takes to make the layout functional. It took 5 of us many months to do all the jsp coding, but that's more developer than designer. Templates are nice, but the designer isn't going anywhere anytime soon.

There's plenty need for web designers. I have designed websites for 3 companies and all the companies didn't know anything of available templates. There are many people who don't know the existence of premade templates, so they end up in hiring people like us.

Even no one will hire webdesigner, still I want to learn webdesigning, formyself I want to make a website made by me. Im a very noob/newbei in webdesigning now. I only know basic html and css and it gives me the ability to change the content of a good/attractive website., bt still I want to learn more so I can make my own website.,for this I need the help of the experts and other people who have knowledge in webdesigning world.

First, web designers are still needed. Even though there are a bunch of pre-made templates out there, there is still a certain level of know-how to get them to do what you want. Even then, there are plenty of people and businesses that go this route and realize that they need help. One thing you can do is learn how to develop sites with a CMS (Content Management System) like Wordpress, Drupal and Joomla. There's a bit of money to be made there. Not as much as 'from scratch' web design, but it's also a much faster turnaround.

Learn jQuery. It's not difficult and it's GORGEOUS! It made web 2.0 what it is today. With jQuery, you can do just about anything. There are free plugins that allow you to make your site look like and do things that were only imagined before, unless you used Flash...

Check out http://jqueryui.com/ which will give you some great tools to get going on website design. As for functionality? There's an app (jQuery plugin) for that...

HTML5 is coming, so get on that. I feel that it's going to make Flash and jQuery tools of the past. It's going to take a year or so for it to really catch on, but it is coming.

Oh, and start charging your friends if you aren't. I fell into that box once and was hounded to do things free. Once I put my foot down and demanded some kind of payment, the requests dwindled. They didn't go away, and I charge MUCH less than I would anyone else. Sometimes the payment would be dinner, or mowing my lawn, but not free, no, no more.

The days of designing web sites with Photoshop and Notepad are gone. Today there are a lot more tools necessary to compete. Learn them and get yourself out there.

Thanks a lot for the Tips bigsilk. I really appreciate tips like this as Im a newbei wannabe webdesigner. I want to have my own webdesign made by myself. I'll follow what you say, Il try to study jquery, its sounds hard for me but il read and study about it.

Sticking only to web designing will not make you a professional... amazon.com is amazing for all web designers,but it is all done to you...being a web developer what i say is why not do some creative things ,you learn a lot in developing ... if you have any problems or you need web developer contact me by clicking the site...we are free to help you..

Sticking only to web designing will not make you a professional... amazon.com is amazing for all web designers,but it is all done to you...being a web developer what i say is why not do some creative things ,you learn a lot in developing ... if you have any problems or you need web developer contact me by clicking the site...we are free to help you..

Yeah, I want to design/develop a site with more interactions, some might be look like database, games or application..but reality, that things are very far as of now for me. Since I have basic knowledge only in html/css/script/flash,
Any tips for beginners like me? As of now maybe I need to start with Jquery, cos I have zero knowledge for that.

I want to develop/Design a website for my Church, groups, Childrens interactive site, and funs sites for my friends.

Currently my resources to study all this webdesign and webdeveloping are:

1.) Internet Connections of 16mb/s but actual performance is around 12-13Mbps only
2.) Shared webhosting account on which I can publish unlimited domains with unlimited bandwidth, and supports CGI, Ruby (RoR), Perl, PHP, MySQL and unlimited SQL Databases, (I don't even know how to use this features)

as of Now, I don't have directions, yeah maybe I'l start with the study of Jquery first and next might be the server side script.

Thank you guys for the help/tips you have given.

(For Mahesh, Thanks for the hospitality, by the way do you have any links for a good site to study with in developing, or any sites you can recommend for beginners like me? Thanks in advance)..

Yeah, I want to design/develop a site with more interactions, some might be look like database, games or application..but reality, that things are very far as of now for me. Since I have basic knowledge only in html/css/script/flash,
Any tips for beginners like me? As of now maybe I need to start with Jquery, cos I have zero knowledge for that.

I want to develop/Design a website for my Church, groups, Childrens interactive site, and funs sites for my friends.

Currently my resources to study all this webdesign and webdeveloping are:

1.) Internet Connections of 16mb/s but actual performance is around 12-13Mbps only
2.) Shared webhosting account on which I can publish unlimited domains with unlimited bandwidth, and supports CGI, Ruby (RoR), Perl, PHP, MySQL and unlimited SQL Databases, (I don't even know how to use this features)

as of Now, I don't have directions, yeah maybe I'l start with the study of Jquery first and next might be the server side script.

Thank you guys for the help/tips you have given.

(For Mahesh, Thanks for the hospitality, by the way do you have any links for a good site to study with in developing, or any sites you can recommend for beginners like me? Thanks in advance)..

Check out www.w3schools.com. They have deep tutorials on just about everything related to developing websites, including quizzes and tests. You can also download wamp server (google it.) It creates a SQL server on your own computer, so you don't need to share server space with anyone. It supports a lot of the same things a host would charge you money for. But if you do need a server, I use siteflip.com. My bill is less than $12 a year. Yes, I said a year.

Remembering of course that w3schools tutorials are well known to be out of date or contain errors, and they have no relationship to wc3, the web consortium that sets web standards...

Out of date? Yeah, sometimes. But I don't recall having found errors. I'm sure, however, that the administrators of the site would respond pretty quickly should one be reported to them.

I'd been away from web design for several of years, doing instead mostly print design. When I'd come back into the fold, I'd realized that things had changed quite a bit. W3schools became a good way for me to brush up on my old chops and learn some new stuff. Of course, there are hundreds of resources out there, and I used about half of them, I think...

Yeah w3schools, I've seen them on top of tutorial sites.. how I wish I can finish all there lessons, need more motivation to do it. Time is important for everything.

I Truly thank all of you for your time and effort regarding my concren on "Becoming a Web designer" all replies were very unique and helpful.

Sam

Be a part of the DaniWeb community

We're a friendly, industry-focused community of developers, IT pros, digital marketers, and technology enthusiasts meeting, networking, learning, and sharing knowledge.