What Is Web Design?

Web design refers to the appearance, layout, and design of websites. Rather than software development, web design usually refers to the user experience and front-facing aspects of a website. A Web Designer, therefore, works on the appearance, layout, look, structure, and content of websites.

What Are the Types of Website Design?

There are two types of website design that can be used to properly design a site: adaptive and responsive. Understanding when to use each is very important for any Web Designer.

What Is Adaptive Web Design?

Adaptive web design uses at least two versions of a website to fit different screen sizes. There are two main categories of adaptive websites: those that adapt based on the type of device being used, and those that adapt based on browser width.

The benefits of adaptive web designs are that it’s faster to make custom designs more quickly and easily without code. They’re also compatible across different devices and browsers, and pages will load quickly.

On the other hand, you miss out on some effects that can only be used with responsive sites, and if you use the aforementioned category that goes by type of device, your site can look broken in a smaller browser window on a desktop.

What Is Responsive Web Design?

Responsive websites can use flexible grid layouts that are based on the percentage each element takes up in its container. For instance, if a single element is 30 percent, it will always be 30 percent regardless of the size of the screen used by the device that is accessing the site.

As a result, you get a uniformly excellent experience no matter how big the screen is on your device. Also, there are a ton of responsive website templates out there you can use.

The drawbacks? If you’re starting at the beginning, you’ll need to test your site extensively. And if you haven’t had the chance to learn how to code, custom responsive website designs can be pretty difficult to build.

The Visual Elements of Web Design

Written copy

As much as Web Designers need to concern themselves with esthetics, your written content is absolutely essential to the success of your design. Not only will that go a long way toward determining your place in search results, it’s also what most users are after when they come to your site. The writing should be direct, informative, and concise.

Fonts

Many of us read without even considering the typography, but whether we’re conscious of it or not, your fonts are a very important part of your overall design. If you haven’t before, start paying attention to the fonts you see. Check out iconic businesses and consider why they chose the typography that they did.

Colors

Selecting a color can be downright daunting. Would your site look better with a monochrome color design – where a single color is used as the base with varying degrees of saturation, brightness, and various hues – or a complementary design that pairs two colors on opposite sides of the color wheel? Whatever you decide, consistency is important.

Layout

In many ways, the useability, functionality, and visual appeal of your website will be determined by how you choose to arrange your content. There are no hard-and-fast rules with regard to layout, but be sure to keep your target audience in mind and make sure the layout is intuitive to use.

Shapes

Incorporate graphic elements in your design to provide a huge boost to your website’s overall appearance. Eye-catching colors and shapes used together can help direct the attention of your audience’s visit to your website.

Spacing

To create a visually impressive website that’s natural to navigate, spacing is key. Using whitespace appropriately is essential in creating a design that keeps text, photos, and graphics in perfect balance. Using whitespace consistently and expertly will make your site a breeze to navigate.

Images and icons

Well-chosen images and icons will help you convey a lot of information in very little time. Select images and icons that are in line with your messaging and branding. Pexels, Unsplash, and IconMonstr offer free images and icons you can use, or you can get a paid account with Shutterstock to meet your stock image needs.

The Functional Elements of Web Design

Information architecture

Information architecture is all about ensuring that the information on your site is organized and presented in a logical way. A common mistake is to confuse the term “information architecture” with a website’s menus. Although menus are a part of information architecture, that doesn’t tell the whole story. Good information architecture creates a hierarchy that aligns with how users want to interact with the website. So user research and testing are key.

Users should have a very easy time navigating your website. They should be able to access your menus from any page, and they should be able to intuit where to find the pages and information they need. Interactive menus are great, but functionality is the most important feature of a menu – so don’t get so carried away that users get lost on your site. They’ll get frustrated and go somewhere else.

User interactions

Visitors to your website will have different ways of using your site based on their device (scrolling, typing, swiping, and so on). These should be simple. There are a few design principles pertaining to user interactions you should keep in mind: never underline text unless you can click on it; don’t auto-play anything; people should be able to fill out forms even if they’re accessing them from a mobile device; and don’t use pop-ups.

Animations

Like videos, animation can be a real attention-getter and help your website feel interactive. One example is adding “like” buttons. Still, less is often more in this area so make sure your pages don’t feel cluttered.

Page speed

These days, few people have the patience to wait for a website to load. Not only that, but Google’s algorithms punishes slow sites. Some site builders can compress your content to ensure users have a snappy experience, but there are some dazzling designs that are just too much to handle. If you’re unsure, try Google’s Page Speed Test.

Site structure

Structure is a key element in search engine optimization and the user experience offered by your site. Users should smoothly navigate through your website without encountering any structural issues. If users are getting lost, you can bet “crawlers” — an automated program that scans your site to determine its functionality — are getting lost too. That leads to bad user experience and low site rankings.

Browser and device compatibility

No matter what device, screen, or browser your user is using, your site should look perfect. If you’re just getting started building your site, try a cross-browsing testing tool to flag any issues that might arise. If you’re designing on a website building platform, that testing is probably handled by the company’s development team.

What is a Web Designer?

Web Designers create and build websites and web pages by combining any number of visual design elements including text, photos, graphics, animations and videos. A Web Designer could create a brand new website or simply make updates to the design and layout of existing pages.

Web Designers are not primarily responsible for knowing how the code works that underpins their designs — but instead their focus is creating aesthetically pleasing and that users have a positive user experience when they visit the website. Web Designers might use programming languages like HTML, CSS and JavaScript, will utilize graphic design software — including products like Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator and GIMP — to aid in creating eye-catching design, and they will test their designs through the construction of prototypes and wireframes.

What Are the Job Responsibilities of a Web Designer?

Though the exact responsibilities will vary from job to job, generally speaking most web design roles will have all of the following responsibilities:

Conceptualizing creative website ideas for and with clients
Designing engaging and responsive website landing pages
Employing industry and design best practice through website build process
Conducting testing and improving the website design to create the best possible user experience
Integrating client CMS programs and data feeds into websites
Optimizing sites for maximum speed and scalability
Establishing design guidelines, standards, and best practices, potentially in a style guide document
Designing visual imagery for websites and ensuring that they are in line with branding for clients
Liaising with Back-End Developers or a web development team to ensure web and app logic is properly integrated
Ensuring website function and stability across devices i.e. desktop, mobile, tablet
Working with marketing and research teams to incorporate brand elements and relevant market research findings into website
Communicating design ideas using user flows, process flows, site maps, prototypes and wireframes
Incorporating functionalities and features into websites
Designing sample pages including colors and fonts
Preparing design plans and presenting the website structure
Providing internal support and external customer service throughout the build and launch process of the website

Characteristics of an Effective Web Designer

1. They’re passionate about their portfolios

You might notice that any good Web Designer is going to pour a lot of time, energy and effort into creating the perfect portfolio website.

To succeed as a Web Designer, one needs to have a polished, professional and eye-catching portfolio to showcase the past projects you’re most proud of and show any would-be client or employer that you can spin the same magic for them.

These web design work samples should be varied and show your versatility as a Web Designer. And trim the fat — a quality over quantity approach is definitely preferred.

2. Good business sense

Web Designers, especially when they’re starting out in their career and are therefore more likely to survive on freelance gigs, must have a decent head on their shoulders when it comes to business.

When negotiating with a company over pricing, Web Designers need to know what the competition pricing is and market their services in a competitive way relative to their experience level and location. A good Web Designer also knows how to come up with a realistic budget, pricing and schedule for the services they’re proposing, another element that requires a bit of a head for numbers.

Freelance Web Designers will also have to deal with contracts, something the best designers don’t take lightly. Don’t just glance at the pricing and sign off on anything without being clear on the terms.

3. They’re organized and stick to schedule

The best Web Designers have lost count of how many websites they’ve designed over the course of a career. Over time, they developed clear processes that have been refined again and again. As a result, they can easily identify — and avoid — any pitfalls or mistakes ahead of time.

That’s important because time is a crucial aspect of any website project. A good Web Designer needs to supply clients with a document of their website development process to show how they’re going to go about building a website.

Effective Web Designers will also inform stakeholders in advance any time they encounter a problem that could put deadlines in jeopardy. Although one should never miss a deadline, if it doesn’t happen, good Web Designers would be detailed in explaining why they failed to meet their schedule.

4. They’re flexible

Even as we reference the importance of meeting deadlines, it’s also worth acknowledging that sometimes things come up that no one could have predicted. Whether it’s clients changing their minds about a design feature or the web development team hitting a snag with the back-end of the proposed website, a Web Designer needs to roll with the punches and alter the scope or contents of a web design project on the fly.

Web Designers should be ready, willing and eager to adapt and confront problems should they crop up.

It’s also best for Web Designers to be flexible in the types of tasks they perform. Web design work on a website could eventually span duties Web Designers don’t typically perform — say, content creation or SEO — but it’s to everyone’s benefit if one meets those challenges with enthusiasm.

5. They have strong communication skills

Expert Web Designers will talk to clients in a down-to-earth, jargon-free way to explain the web technologies and design ideas they’re considering.

If Web Designers can’t communicate intricate concepts and terms to clients — whether in person verbally or in writing over email — they won’t be trusted to communicate a company message via their design.

Working in web design means interacting with many different professions, most of whom have totally different roles. Handling all of those relationships smoothly is the something all great Web Designers need to learn to do.

They are open to ideas

Inevitably, clients or stakeholders are going to have ideas for how they think their company website should look. Sometimes those ideas will be great, and sometimes they won’t be — but it’s the job of Web Designers to listen and take those ideas into consideration as they continue on with the website.

You never know where the next great design idea could come from. Good Web Designers will also scour the web for inspiration and to explore the latest design trends.

7. They are familiar with the latest design tools

New tools are constantly being created, improved or introduced to help make web design easier.

Good Web Designers are committed to constantly exploring the use of these tools to make themselves more efficient and effective. This could mean up-skilling with online courses, workshops or bootcamp courses, or just staying on top of webinars, YouTube tutorials and design blogs that could cover the latest innovations.

These tools often empower Web Designers to focus on big-picture elements of their websites rather than being stuck in the weeds worrying about smaller tasks.

They have a sense for design and an understanding of their users

It probably goes without saying that you can’t be a good Web Designer unless you understand design and how to make things visually appealing, not to mention important web design theory principles like color theory, structure and user experience.

UX design, whether it’s in Web Designers’ official titles or not, is increasingly an important part of any design job. Web Designers can get inside the shoes of their users and understand what they want and how they will likely move through as they experience the website.

That means that Web Designers must leverage whatever user research and data analysis you have access to so you can make informed decisions about the design and structure of the site.

What Are Some Similar Roles to Web Designers?

User Experience (UX) Designer

It’s the job of a UX Designer to create products that are usable, intuitive and accessible by conducting extensive user research and testing on each aspect of a user’s journey through a website. Usually, the UX design team works as part of a wider product team that also includes Web Developers, Product Managers and data professionals. UX design is about being an advocate for users and improving usability while at the same time trying to use that extensive user research to identify opportunities and support overall business goals. User experience design and web design roles go hand in hand.

User Interface (UI) Designer

UI and UX design are commonly confused. User interface design applies UX design principles to a product’s interface (a sitemap, layout or menu for instance). UI design is about how the product’s interfaces look, work and feel. UI Designers are also usually responsible for ensuring products are responsive, accessible and inclusive no matter which browser you’re using (even Internet Explorer!), and would also span ideas like interaction design.

Front-End Web Developer

Like Web Designers, a Front-End Web Developer works on the client side of websites, but with more of a focus on the code, using a variety of programming languages including JavaScript, HTML and CSS to build websites. In some situations, it might be the responsibility of a Front-End Web Developer to actually implement what Web Designers have created. Again, the lines between the positions blur, because many Web Designers do work regularly with HTML, CSS and JavaScript too, and a Front-End Web Developer would usually have some input on design.

Visual Designer

Visual Designers are responsible for the esthetics of the buttons, icons and backgrounds that users see when they visit a site. They also oversee resizing assets for different devices, creating email marketing items, presentation materials, and interactive event materials, and they would typically draft a guide to let others in the organization know about standards for visual elements on the site.

Information Architect

Another position focused on website interfaces, Information Architects decide how to arrange the parts of something so that it can be understood. Information architecture is a science of organizing, arranging and structuring content of a website or app, among other things. Information Architects aim at putting content together in such a way that users easily and quickly find what they need.

What Tools Does a Web Designer Use?

Though some don’t think of it as a highly technical role, Web Designers in fact must use an array of tools to handle things like website creation, design and prototyping, and graphic design.

What Are Essential Web Design Tools?

WordPress

A top tool of choice for much of the design industry for a long time now, WordPress is a powerful tool for building websites — it’s been estimated that anywhere from 25 to 35 percent of the Internet worldwide is powered by WordPress. It has around a 75 percent market share among CMS.

Boasting more than 1,000 built-in themes and plugins, WordPress gives users a buffet of options to install, edit, customize, enhance, and build out their websites.

InVision Studio

Originally, InVision offered a cloud-based prototype service that integrated with other tools on this list like Sketch and Photoshop. Now, however, InVision Studio is a full-featured interface design and prototyping tool.

To put it simply, InVision Studio is like an advanced version of Sketch, complete with collaboration tools, motion animations, and options to create and share prototypes. To share prototypes using InVision Studio’s cloud service, you can select a free plan or, if you want more collaborators and projects, one of its paid offerings.

Figma

A relatively new tool compared to some on this list, Figma has nevertheless already built a large fanbase among Designers as a feature-loaded tool that many love to use for interface design and prototyping.

Figma features an easy-to-use, vector-based interface that makes designing websites a breeze. The same things that can be accomplished with Sketch or Adobe XD, can also be done with Figma.

Figma really stands out for its collaborative, cloud-based approach. With Figma, multiple team members can edit a design file simultaneously while stakeholders can leave comments.

Photoshop

There’s a reason Photoshop has been an industry leader for as long as most of us can remember: it’s a powerhouse, all-in-one graphic design tool.

Since starting out as a platform only for photo editing, Photoshop now can be used for interface design, video editing, graphic design, and more (and it’s still, of course, a great photo editor).

While many Web Designers tend to favor Photoshop due to its flexibility, others prefer more specialized tools on this list

Bootstrap

An old favorite, Bootstrap revolutionized development and is now the world’s most popular framework for building responsive, mobile-first sites.

Bootstrap is a free library of HTML, JavaScript, and CSS that makes coding a website from scratch much easier and less time-consuming. Bootstrap’s many appealing features include a grid system, a large library of components – including headers, navigation, alerts, and forms – and responsive breakpoints. An extremely popular interface design tool, Sketch allows Web Designers to smoothly and intuitively create gorgeous, high-fidelity mockkups.

Web Designers find Sketch significantly easier to use than other design tools, allowing them to begin creating dazzling designs quickly. It also has its own world of plugins and integrations add power and make it easy to slip Sketch into your workflow.

However, Sketch’s prototyping and collaboration features are not as advanced as other tools out there.

The component library includes headers, navigation, buttons, forms, alerts, and more. The Bootstrap team has comprehensively documented each feature, complete with examples and suggestions for customization.

Sketch

An extremely popular interface design tool, Sketch allows Web Designers to smoothly and intuitively create gorgeous, high-fidelity mockkups.

However, Sketch’s prototyping and collaboration features are not as advanced as other tools out there.

What Skills Does a Web Designer Need?

To succeed as a Web Designer, you really need an elusive mix of both technical – or hard – skills as well as soft skills, since it’s a job that requires top-notch communication and excellent collaborative skills.

What Does a Web Designer Need to Know?

A Web Designer needs to know web design theory and industry best practices, search engine optimization (SEO) tactics, and how to work collaboratively with clients and stakeholders to make sure you’re meeting their needs.

Learning web design theory is important because there are certain foundational principles for creating excellent websites, including color theory, structure and user experience. If you don’t attend college, you can still study this theory through a coding bootcamp or online course.

SEO is an increasingly in-demand skill. As the visual architect of your site, you’ll be responsible for ensuring that it has all the elements in place to rank high in search.

Client and stakeholder management is another skill necessary to thrive as a Web Designer. Web Designers rarely have full autonomy over their creations and need to work collaboratively to ensure buy-in on a new design.

Also, most Web Designers need at least some knowledge of commonly used programming languages like HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and jQuery. This is probably most important for freelancers, while Web Designers working at bigger companies or an agency will more likely work on a team that includes Programmers and Graphic Designers.

Technical Skills Every Web Designer Needs

Visual design

Visual design is the art of selecting the right design principles to boost the look and enhance the feel of a website. Web Designers with advanced visual designing skills tend to do extremely well. Visual design is closely linked to user experience, only that it’s more related to the esthetic elements.

The most common tools used in visual designing are grid systems, spacing typography, color psychology, and type hierarchy.

UX

The user experience (UX) of a website can be described as the feeling visitors have during their end-to-end interaction with your website. UX is one of the most crucial factors in defining a website’s success, especially as design philosophy becomes increasingly user-focused.

A Web Designer who understands UX practices will always approach his designs from a user-first perspective. Conducting research is a crucial part of the UX process, and then using those insights to improve things like navigation, content, colors, and so on.

Design software

Like any other professional, you need the right tools to get the job done. You should definitely familiarize yourself with all the industry-standard design software. Tools like Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, and Sketch are ones that almost all Designers use for important parts of their job like creating mockups, designing logos and images, and of course modifying and enhancing photos.

A good Web Designer should learn how to use them.

HTML

For a long time, Web Designers believed that coding was something they wouldn’t have to deal with. If that was ever true, it’s not now: Web Designers are expected at minimum to understand HTML (HyperText Markup Language).

HTML helps you place and optimize your content on the web, giving it structure and form. You’ll need it to get content up on your site.

CSS

CSS or Cascading Style Sheets is a specific code that tells web browsers how to format and style the HTML components of a page.

To put it in simpler terms, CSS helps you improve the esthetic appeal of your content. Using this coding language, you can change fonts, tweak colors, add/remove backgrounds, and much more.

Is Web Design a Good Career?

Yes, Web Design is a good career. Not only are Web Designers currently in high demand by employers, the field is expected to grow by 27 percent by the year 2024. That demand will ensure salaries stay high for Web Designers moving forward.

How Much Does a Web Designer Make?

Web Designers have an annual base income somewhere between $45,000 (Indeed) and $53,000 (Glassdoor). The average salary for Senior Web Designers is just north of $82,000, according to ZipRecruiter.

Meanwhile, ZipRecruiter pointed to at least five jobs related to the Senior Web Designer job category that pay more per year than a typical Senior Web Designer salary. Some of these roles include: Senior Product Designer, Senior Brand Designer, Senior UX Designer and Senior Visual Designer. Each of those pays more than $100,000 on average.

It also depends on where you live. The top five top-paying cities – all of which were in California – pay Web Designers roughly 20 percent more than the national average.

How Long Does It Take to Become a Web Designer?

The length of time it takes to become a Web Designer varies, but short courses and coding bootcamps have proven that it’s possible to get the skills and portfolio you need to qualify for entry-level Web Designer jobs in as little as three months.

Of course, that would require attending a very intensive, full-time course to learn all the necessary skills required by most Web Designer jobs – things like learning visual design theory, building an understanding user experience (UX), and becoming proficient with Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, Sketch, HTML, and CSS. Part-time courses would likely take closer to 30 weeks.

It’s also possible to become a self-taught Web Designer, but it will take longer. If you’re planning to go that route, it could take years to build up the various skills you need while also trying to slowly grow a freelance portfolio before you will have the resume and portfolio necessary to apply for a Web Designer job. Even then, many Web Designer job postings still require formal training or education of some kind.

Web Designing