Excel Lessons Online

Breaking into web design and or IT in general has never been harder. Employers are seeking more and more experience, certification, and education. There really is no magical formula besides hard work and a continual dedication to learning new technologies. However, I will outline some tips on what can help you get started on your career as a web designer.

1. Learn HTML and XHTML- both are very similar (as noticed by the name) but XHTML is the newer standard of the two. Essentially XHTML, doesn’t let you get away with forgetting the closing bracket “>” for many tags, it is stricter but leaner and will eventually replace old html. The reason I point out knowing html by heart is that you never know what your employer is going to use a a text editor, besides, knowing the code will save you many hours of trying to figure out a mistake made by using the graphical interface. The reason I stress this as my main point is that depending on who you work for, different companies many times use different editors, and while Dreamweaver is essentially the industry standard as far as web design goes, knowing what’s under the hood canl make or break the next job interview.

2. Learn to use Photoshop-
I am guilty of procrastinating on this, I got into the comfort zone of using Fireworks, the graphical editor that comes with the Macromedia Studio. The truth is that most companies use photoshop. Please don’t misunderstand, you don’t have to become an expert in photoshop to be a web designer, that’s the job of graphic designer. But to break in, you should know how to move around and do simple tasks such as resizing photos, cropping, and slicing, good-tutorials.com has tutorials on basically everything having to do with photoshop.

3.Know how to use ftp clients (programs) It is not hard- This thrid point, is important because after you build and test locally, you then have to upload to the server. Using different types of ftp clients is good, because as I said before you never know which one a company will use. So if you are used to using Dreamweaver’s built in ftp client, download filezilla and learn to use that one as well. Filezilla in particular is great because you can chmod (change permissions) files on the fly. And it is free.

Other Thoughts-

As with most things, there are other areas which you need familiarize yourself with in order to become a web designer. Just to name a few…JavaScript, PHP, SQL, Linux administration. Most of the these are not officially in a web designers job description , but knowing them can go a long way in getting your foot in the door.

Next article will be focused on how to get a portfolio and experience.

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