Shouldn't Everyone Learn Web Design?

Most of the first world uses the web but how many people know basic web design skills? Website design skills are now just as important as knowing basic mathematics or science. Almost every company has a website and most people now use social media daily.

Basic coding and web skills can increase your job prospects and can even help you maintain your own blog. 

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HTML (Hyper-Text Markup Language) is the language or code behind every website. It contains all the information about a site, such as the text, images and links on a webpage. A website would simply not exist without HTML. It is the ‘back office’ of every website you visit and one of the most important skills every web designer needs.

The versatile HTML can be used to design websites of all varieties from huge eCommerce businesses such as Amazon to personal blogs such as my own.

But HTML does not work alone, you might have the content but how do you want it to look? This is where CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) comes in. The CSS file is used to design a website’s overarcing style so each page looks similar to the last one. It sets a layout for the website so things look tidy when people visit. 

Both HTML and CSS require coding knowledge, however, with a bit of learning even the most technically inept can make inroads into understanding the basics. There are many sites offering guides and training such as W3 and the excellent Codecademy that are there to help if you need it.  

Once you master basic HTML and CSS skills, maintaining a website does not end there. You will need to learn how to write the site’s content, however, this does not mean you have to write professional quality articles every time you want to post something. Take my blog as an example, I write about things I am interested in and people read it. Find what you love and write about it. Practise makes perfect and your writing skill will improve over time.

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After you have learned how to design a website and create its content, there is one more skill you need to ensure your website or blog is a success. SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) tools help your website or blog appear high up in Google when users search for any associated keywords. For example, if I am looking for web design companies in Peterborough, I will type “website design Peterborough” in Google and I will pick from one of the top results. It has been proven that users are less likely to see your website if it is placed on the second page of Google search results, or beyond.

Find a keyword you want to be found for but make sure it is not too popular or used by big brands because you are less likely to win the SEO war. For example, a comic book store might want to be the first result when people type in “comic book store in East London” instead of “comic books UK”. 

In order to get your website to be the first result or even a result on the first page you will likely have to do a lot of SEO work, depending on how competitive the terms you are targeting are. There are a number of key considerations to effective SEO, and not least of them is knowing how to promote your work elsewhere across the web. A comic book store employee might write a piece on comic con on a geeky website and reference their comic book store in the article with a link.

Links get picked up by Google’s clever web spanning spiders and are used to attribute worth to a site which then helps determine its position in the search results.

Remember, the web is always changing so you will have to keep up to date with the latest website trends, coding practises and SEO updates so work so your website doesn’t fall onto page 4 in Google.