A website designer is a person who specializes in designing websites. This is much more complicated than it sounds – it’s just not all about making it look pretty. A web designer need a vast arsenal of skills to be an effective designer.
- Design Skills: Although obvious, the designer must have a keen eye for layout design and detail. The design process will encompass everything from mood boards, wireframes, typeface hierarchy, color theory and more. What’s more – they must understand and represent how the website will change on different screen sizes.
- UX: The designer must have a good grasp of user experience (UX) to understand what makes users calm, frustrated, happy and agitated when they use a website. User experience is all about approaching the website design from a user-first perspective — not company-first. It must answer the question “How do I get them exactly what they need”. To do this the designer will need to do research and may need to create user persona’s in order to understand the best user flow.
- HTML and CSS: While most designer’s don’t do the actual coding, the designer must still understand the limitations and needs of the system that the site will be designed in. If the site will be built within a framework like Bootstrap, the designer needs to use the bootstrap grid system while designing to ensure that items stay within the grid structure. If designing within a CMS like WordPress or Drupal, it’s important that the designer know what plugins are available to him and the limitations of the template or CMS system.