Web designer jobs involve designing, building, and maintaining a company’s online presence. Responsibilities can be spread across multiple employees, with visual and interface designers creating the look and feel of the site. Some web designers also write code in languages like PHP and JavaScript to create more complex programs. Flash sites are popular but have usability issues.
There are many web designer jobs available, and interested parties may find themselves wondering what exactly web designer jobs entail. The thing is, with the internet ever evolving and evolving, the term web designer is often used as a generic catch-all for a number of different roles and responsibilities.
In their most basic form, web designer jobs involve designing, building, and maintaining a company’s presence on the Internet. Web designer jobs can have all of these responsibilities wrapped up in one role, or they can be spread across a number of employees, each focusing on one element of web design.
As the name suggests, one of the most common web designer jobs is simply designing. There are two main types of web design: visual and interface. A visual web designer is responsible for the overall look and feel of the site. They may not need to know XHTML or CSS and may only work in a graphics program like Photoshop. Most companies, however, even if they’re just looking for a designer to handle the graphic design, want that person to also have an understanding of how the code works, so that the templates they send out to the actual programmers are built to be implemented. .
Interface designers may do some graphical design, but their primary responsibility is to create an architecture for the site that makes it easy to navigate and use. They decide which buttons should be where, how various widgets should work, and generally dictate what the user experience will be like. For small to medium sized sites most of the interface design is done by the same person who does the visual design, but for larger sites there is likely to be one person whose primary responsibility is the interface.
Once the visual design is done, the site must actually be built. In its most basic form, this means building the XHTML or HTML and creating a cascading style sheet (CSS) document if needed. While XHTML, HTML, and CSS all require some learning, they are simple enough that anyone with a little persistence can learn them. There are also a number of easy-to-use web page creation programs, so that even people who can’t learn the necessary languages can create pages from their projects.
Web designer jobs may also include creating sites in Flash, rather than writing the pages using HTML. Many traditional designers like Flash sites because the Flash environment is a visual environment and allows for much more control over the look and feel of the final site. Some people don’t like Flash, however, because it has a number of usability issues, where sites may be inaccessible to some groups of people.
Web designer jobs can also be actual coding jobs, with a number of web designers taking on roles writing PHP, ASP, JavaScript, and a number of other languages to create more elaborate programs that can run through a website. The AJAX philosophy, which integrates a number of existing technologies, has become very popular in modern websites, and so many web designer jobs are for people with a background in the various languages and technologies that make up AJAX systems.
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