Considering a Career Change in Web Design

[subrosa]

I hope members of the forum can give me some candid advice as to how to proceed with making a career change into web design. I've used some of the more common programs and like Xara, but I don't believe it's realistic to think that's all I need. My questions are regarding what types of training, if any did you receive, was it on the job, military, online, etc. Do most of you work for a company or remote. I've asked a couple of admissions types at a couple of colleges and they will only tell you what you want to hear, not the straight story.

Any advice is helpful and is appreciated in advance.

[Ross Macintosh]

It seems you are willing to go to school to learn. It isn't your only option but I do think it is a good one if you find a program that suits you. To do so I'd suggest some web research: find out who are all the web designers in your area. Visit sites that they've designed and try to see who's work you admire. Then contact them and ask them about their education and any advice they might have for you. If there isn't any local hotshots out there expand your research to other areas.

As in any formal education, the programs are not created equal. If you can find the one that suits your personality and aspirations, you will excel. The program that's right for someone else might not be right for you. Or you may excel where they did not. Ask questions of about the character of the program -for instance a technical or artistic focus- and ideally go visit and see their students, facilities & faculty first hand. Education can be a wonderful journey. Embrace it and expand your mind.

Good Luck!

[gbpatriot]

If you enjoy on-line learning you could try vtc.com.
Here is a link to their site where you can try out many of their free lessons.
Their extensive range of video tutorials cover most major web applications.

http://www.vtc.com/internet.htm

At $30 per month I find it great value. You can activate and deactivate your account to suit your needs.

Ray

[slavelle]

I have recently added web design as a service of my IT company. I am using Xara as one of the tools in my toolbelt, along with others, such as xara xtreme for some graphics stuff, Paint Shop Pro for when I can't get a certain bitmap thing to happen in xara, Microsoft Expression Web as my coding IDE of choice, Swishmax for creating flash animations on the cheap (with more options than I can get within xara itself, especially for text effects or any scripting, though for quick ones, xara has been handy), Camtasia for creating tutorial videos, Sonar (audio application) for creating both music and tutorials on how to use Sonar, etc. I even customize Jooma! CMS sites occassionally when it's called for.

Each application has a certain place it fits in either as part of a project or the whole thing and every one of these has a learning curve, each with varying "steepness".

I have learned eveything I know from playing with the programs, reading books, online articles, blogs, tutorials and user forums - and of course the manuals and helpfiles! I have a background in Computer Information Systems and having been professionally emplyed as such for the last 20 years or so, and as a result, I can pick up a lot of application oriented stuff pretty quickly, as I've been forced to support and use many arcane systems over the years.

For ME, this has been a good route. Not everyone can DO the self-study thing, though. Do you have natural talent or a background in a related field? This will help determine what level of "schooling" you need. I also have my bachelors degree in CIS as well as my Microsoft MCSE certification, so it wasn't ALL self-study - like I said, some of it just comes from industry experience and exposure.

There are some programs in the local colleges here (Kennesaw college in Georiga, specifically) that look to be pretty decent and I'd like to take one for my own edification, but I don't feel the need to - it's purely out of a desire to expand my thoughts and processes (and maybe my toolkit, again).

I hope this input has been helpful.

[GregWallis]

Right, this is a difficult one. You have to realize that there are almost the same number of web designers as there are end users. The market is saturated with web designers, and employers can now be very picky about who they take on. Go it alone? The competition's very stiff, very experienced, and have glossy portfolios. Also, web design skills aren't enough, now. A thorough understanding of development and the associated languages is very much a must to all new comers. Old dinosaurs like me get away with it, but I've got a lot of developer contacts so that's not too tricky.

Would I go into web design from scratch now? No, I wouldn't even consider it. The times where big money was paid has long gone and struggling to make a living will be just that, a struggle. Yes, others will probably remonstrate and disagree, and that's their prerogative but do honestly give this a long, hard think before you go ahead. And what seems like fun when you dabble, can turn into a boring slog in the real world.

But... if you're absolutely determined, then all the information is already at your fingertips on the web. More help and assistance than you can throw a stick at. College? Forget it, by the time it's on the syllabus it's likely to be old hat and you need to be at the cutting edge (sharp, painful) to be on top of the game.

Apps? There's no one program that will do it all, sadly. Xara's WD is an interesting step forward but offers just one (reasonably narrow) solution that won't cater for all needs, not by a long chalk. Here's a list I think just about covers it, but it's completely open to interpretation.

PhotoShop (Paint Shop Pro DOES work OK, but forget The Gimp, its workflow is too slow for real world use — time is money)

Fireworks (the best web graphics program EVER — very fast, perfect for web graphics, and don't let anyone persuade you otherwise)

Xara Web Designer (a great new tool, perfect for some jobs but not for others; it's cheap and has lots of potential)

Xara Extreme (the vector graphics king, but you'll need to know Illustrator if you go and work for a company)

Dreamweaver (don't think you can do without this, because you can't — it has no real competition, is the daddy, but unfortunately expensive, as is anything Adobe; quite shameful)

PSPad (or any text editor will do, but this is a good 'un and it's free)

Filezilla 3 (faultless FTP, and again, free)

So, truly the best of luck to you, just take off your rose-tinted glasses and have a good look round.

[boobear]

I have recently added web design as a service of my IT company. I am using Xara as one of the tools in my toolbelt, along with others, such as xara xtreme for some graphics stuff, Paint Shop Pro for when I can't get a certain bitmap thing to happen in xara, Microsoft Expression Web as my coding IDE of choice, Swishmax for creating flash animations on the cheap (with more options than I can get within xara itself, especially for text effects or any scripting, though for quick ones, xara has been handy), Camtasia for creating tutorial videos, Sonar (audio application) for creating both music and tutorials on how to use Sonar, etc. I even customize Jooma! CMS sites occassionally when it's called for.

subrosa, slavelle has given some pretty good info here. The tools he mentions are great for creating fairly sophisticated sites. In particular, Xara tools and SwishMax stuff are superb.

For the really "down and dirty" stuff you should also learn PHP, Perl, the "innards" of CSS, etc, etc, etc. Warning: It'll be enough to make enough to make your head spin. I wrote my first code in 1964 (that's NOT a typo) and I've written everything from assembler to COBOL as well as C++, Pascal, etc, etc, etc ad nauseum. Even so, I still have trouble keeping the "details" of all these lang/tools separated in my head.

Let's face it; there have been only a handful of major paradigm changes since I first started: straight in line code, then subroutines(functions or procedures), then "top down" structured, and finally OOP(methods, events, etc), which made things like "drag and drop" programming possible( for example Visual BASIC).

The problem I have personally, is that many potential employers/contractees will "zero in" on something like Perl and be uncomfortable because maybe the last time I touched it was two years ago. You will probably find the same.

Good Luck

Boo

P.S. Content Management Systems like Joomla! appear to possibly be the "coming thing" (to me at least). You can put together some pretty neat sites VERY quickly and a reasonably intelligent end-user can simply maintain it themself. Check out Joomla! plus a Joomla! a database extension called Fabrik; oh yeah and a Joomla! template builder called Artisteer 2. With these three tools (two of them more or less FREE) you can do some pretty great stuff at almost the "speed of light"

[GregWallis]

I agree with Boobear that Joomla is a mighty fine CMS solution, straight out of the box. And fabulously free, too. I was thinking very much along the same lines as Tom Arah when I came across this article:

http://www.pcpro.co.uk/blogs/2009/03...t-dreamweaver/

[slavelle]

To quote from that same article

Without making any explicit commitments, Devin also made it clear that Dreamweaver users can expect further developments when it comes to integration with the big three frameworks:- WordPress, Joomla and Drupal. In particular, knowing I’m a Drupal fan, he recommended that I check out the work Chris Charlton is doing with his Dreamweaver Drupal extension that integrates the Drupal API directly into Dreamweaver.

It would be a dream if XWD had some sort of connection with Joomla!, like the tool Boobear mentioned above (Artisteer2) has. To be able to design a system like Joomla with the great graphics possibilities of Xara directly would be amazing. I know this is a dream - but feel free to dream along with me

[pauland]

Just a little change of emphasis from the other comments.

I've developed software for a long time and first started doing web stuff about five or six years ago. As a software developer I produced workable, functional web interfaces that would be frowned on by most designers because of a lack of aesthetics. I have a reasonable grasp of the various technologies of the web, but use only a very small subset of them.

It's important to know enough so that you know what you don't know and you know what you need to know more about for a particular project.

People seem to focus on the technology of the web and seem to reel off technologies and software as though it's some kind of badge of honour. Knowing a good subset of the technologies is important but won't make you a web designer.

Technologies are important, but they aren't the most important thing for a web designer. A web designer needs some grounding in basic design and some artistic flair. I'm still working on that six years after I started messing with web development. It took me quite a while to realise it's importance. It's no good being a PHP whizz and producing ugly websites.

So my suggestion is this - to be a successful designer you shouldn't just follow the mechanics of the web, you should also follow the principles of web design and they are largely independent of a particular technology. Books on Dreamweaver won't tell you how to lay out a good web page.

Your customers are looking for functionality and aesthetics. The balance between the two depends on the customer.

While you look at technology, don't forget design (and usability). We talk about web design as though it's some special case, but in reality it's (mostly) an extension of the marketing effort of a company, so as well as all that stuff you have to consider how it fits with what the customer does and what their aims are.

Lastly, if you're looking to join a larger company you'll find specialists in different areas of the project. Designers will produce the basic design and style guides, but others will make it work. It can get very specialist. One man bands will of course be expected to do everything.

If you're looking for big bucks, then it's not a straightforward or easy road. Along the way you'll discover people who want an ebay clone for less than $250 and within a week.

Sorry for the ramble..

Paul

[slavelle]

Paul,

Totally agree.

Books on Dreamweaver won't tell you how to lay out a good web page.

In fact, most of the software books I've read focus completely on the mechanics of the software and sort of assume that you are bringing some amount of design capability to the table - or you will indeed make some ugly websites. I was shocked at how bland and unimpressive the default templates within Microsoft's Expression web are. Better than Frontpage, but not by a huge margin.

Being a musician who is also an advanced user or music software (Sonar as mentioned above), I understand this parallel really well. There are a lot of folks who think that they can paste a few loops together and that makes them a musician and gives them the potential to be a pop star. Now, not considering the fact that pop music has largely degraded to inane loop based stuff, the notion of getting there with no talent or background is such a longshot that it's pretty irrelevant at that point what your capabilities are - you got there by pure luck/promotion.

So, yeah, it's something I left out of my list of tools and that is Talent. Talent mixed with knowledge of industry stuff, like basic color manipulation/combination, understanding of how people are going to use the pages you design, knowing the audience and their expected technical capabilities, as well as considering (but not being completely directed by) the vision and desires of the client. I sort of included all this in my statement that IF you have some natural talent or experience in related fields you may be able to get around the tradition education, but know that it's a challenging road. I'm glad web is only one facet of the services that I offer.