The Most Important Web Designer Qualities
I have been thinking lately. While I have had the privilege to be involved in a web design program at a local college I start to question what the most important aspects of web design are. I decided to ask my network. Here is what I ask of you. Ask yourself “If I was to hire a web designer out of college, what would they have to know, and what would be a plus?”, and leave it in the comments. Thank you for taking the time to contribute!
Here are my recommendations:
Must haves:
- Semantics
- Typography
- Separation of Content, Presentation, and Behavior
- Web Standards
- Accessibility
- Usability
- Browser Inconsistencies
- Proper use of Space
- Some Programming Logic
- Object Oriented Programming Principles
- FTP
- Relational Database Systems
Nice to haves:
- Database Design
- Understand programming design patterns - MVC particularly
- Mobile
- Version control
- Web application frameworks - Ruby on Rails, Zend, CodeIgniter
- SSH
Comments
By Scott Radcliff on 12/03/2009
Thanks for commenting. I agree with you on version control, I remember frantically playing catch up with subversion trying to get all the commands down. Very important! The only issue I have is that I am not sure if it is out of scope of basic web design.
I think OO is that important. Every framework works on OOP principles and it is important to at least understand what objects are and how to use them. I agree that concepts like polymorphism may be out of scope, but they must understand objects.
Mobile is growing way too fast to be bundled with basic web design. I complain everytime I go to Mashable on my phone and it doesn’t redirect me to an awesome mobile version.
I would love to see that thesis sometime.
By Jhonson miami on 01/29/2010
Very easy to use. To be honest you cannot beat the services or the people that I have dealt with. I’m good to go.
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By Dazzling on 02/27/2010
Websites are always helpful in one way or the other - what you posted - that’s cool stuff.
Thanks,
Micheal
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By Stephen Jenkins on 12/03/2009
Fantastic list Scott. I spend a lot of time thinking about this topic, and wrote my graduate thesis on what an entry level college course focused on web design should look like.
I really only have a few suggested changes,
1. I think I might remove OO from must haves, I’m just not sure this needs to be taught and the designer level, programmer level - of course.
2. I would DEFINITELY move version control to must haves. If there is one common deficiency and I see (and saw in myself) in young web developers, it is the inability to work in teams. Developing isolationist habits early on makes it very hard to think in a team mode later…
3. Mobile is an interesting point, I go back and forward between thinking we should teach students to develop specifically for mobile, and thinking that we should be teaching them to build really semantic, standards based sites - and letting the mobile browsers catch up.