Road To Becoming a Web Designer
Hi,
So you wanna become a web designer huh? Well before you get into the coding, you should get first have an order in which you want to learn each language. Well, here is the order for you:
HTML - This is the base language that is used in mostly any website. It is also one of the simplest languages to learn for web designing. So be sure to learn it well.
CSS - Once you have HTML down, you have to deal with CSS. This language gives you the style of the website you want. Use HTML and CSS together and you can make your website look like any website. For a tutorial, check out my video series on My Youtube Channel.
CONGRATULATE - Good job! You have already gotten through two languages. Also it is a time to take a break and test out your skills, for now the harder language comes.
PHP/SQL - These languages are a bit more complicated for the reason that it does not deal with the interface but more of the background functions. You may want to check out there own websites for some details.
JAVASCRIPT - Once you have finished with the basic layout of a webpage, you obviously want to have some fun right? Where that is where this language comes in. Javascript is the fun of the coding languages, for it allows you to add some animation, alert boxes and all of that good stuff!
Good job! You can now consider yourself a web designer! But now you put your skills to the test and design a webpage that puts all of these coding languages together. But don't think that you know all of the languages because there are many more and it is your turn to venture and find them.
Cheers,
*Note: The order in which I put these languages is based on what I think people should learn first.
Rohan Kohli Aug 23, 2009 at 12:27 PM in Coding, Web Designing tagged Road, coding, designer, web
Reader Comments (4)
You missed out JavaScript! :(
I modified the post to fit in Javascript. Thanks for the heads up!
I totally agree here. Especially with Javascript being last, the syntax can seem quite complex and it would be wise to get the programming fundamentals under your belt with PHP (which I think has a cleaner syntax etc than js). If you think you've conquered all these. I'd suggest ruby on rails perhaps? Which I think is more commonly used for extreme scale web apps such as twitter. If not try AJAX which is a programming language (Asynchronous Javascript and XML) :)
Excuse the late comment:
I half disagree with this. It may be useful for you to know all of this, but that depends on what you do.
Front end designer ≠ backend developer
The term "web designer" is way overused. A web designer is someone who designs for the web, and codes the front end of a website (looks, interaction, UX, UI, layout, etc.). Front end designers usually need a very strong background in (X)HTML, CSS, and Javascript; however PHP and/ or MySQL certainly don't hurt.
A backend dev on the other hand is someone who needs to have a seriously strong background with developing rich, user intensive web applications. PHP is certainly not the only language a backend developer needs to know. There are more server side scripting languages (Ruby, Perl, ASP, Java, the list goes on). While not 100% mandatory, he or she should also have a strong background in front end/ client side scripting languages.
In this list, I do not think Javascript should be last at all. PHP syntax is far less difficult to learn if one has a background with something like Javascript.