Scott Radcliff

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The Most Important Web Designer Qualities

Saturday March 13, 2010

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:

  1. Semantics
  2. Typography
  3. Separation of Content, Presentation, and Behavior
  4. Web Standards
  5. Accessibility
  6. Usability
  7. Browser Inconsistencies
  8. Proper use of Space
  9. Some Programming Logic
  10. Object Oriented Programming Principles
  11. FTP
  12. Relational Database Systems

Nice to haves:

  1. Database Design
  2. Understand programming design patterns - MVC particularly
  3. Mobile
  4. Version control
  5. Web application frameworks - Ruby on Rails, Zend, CodeIgniter
  6. SSH