What Does a Web Designer Do?
As a web designer, your job is to transform concepts and ideas into responsive and interactive websites that encourage user activity. This requires a delicate balance between aesthetics and functionality, because while a website can look beautiful, it is useless if your audience cannot easily find what they’re looking for. Fortunately, there are a number of design elements that can make your site both appealing and functional, from ensuring its search engine optimization (SEO) to making sure it loads quickly.
If you’ve ever visited a website that takes forever to load, features a garish color scheme, or is difficult to navigate, chances are good that you hit the back button and went elsewhere. According to Krug’s first law of usability, the information on a website should be self-explanatory and easy to understand, but that is often not the case. While many sites try to be clever or unique in their presentation of data, they often confuse users with their illegible layouts, unintuitive navigation and unclear visual hierarchy.
Web designers are concerned with the visible aspects of a website, including color, images and layout. Using design software programs like Adobe, CorelDraw and Inkscape, they create animations, graphics and icons to make a website more visually appealing. They also use coding languages such as HTML and CSS to lay out the structure of a website. Unlike graphic designers, who can simply apply their design skills to print-based media, web designers must be able to translate their creative designs into coded formats that can be rendered on screen.
Considering that nearly 75% of users lose faith in a brand after visiting a poorly designed website, web design is an essential component of any online business. The best websites are the ones that successfully convey a clear message, inspire user engagement and build trust with visitors. Fortunately, there are many elements that can help you achieve these goals, from ensuring your website is mobile-friendly to keeping your content up to date.
When selecting a web design agency, it’s important to find one that has experience with your industry and can provide you with testimonials from past clients. It’s also a good idea to determine whether the agency prefers phone or email communication and how far they are willing to travel for meetings, if necessary. Finally, make sure to get a full quote for the project so that there are no surprises down the line.
The simplest way to test a potential web design agency is to ask their previous clients about their experience. However, since this is a subjective process, you may want to conduct your own research as well. For example, visit the company’s social media accounts to see what their current and former clients are saying about them.
While there are many different factors that go into a successful website, the main principles of web design are simplicity and clarity. To achieve these objectives, start by identifying the goals of your website and consider what type of information your audience needs from it. This will help you decide on the best layout and design for your site. Once you have a layout in mind, focus on creating an interface that is easy to navigate and provides the information your audience is looking for.