In short, it is all about web design. There are, however, over 370 MILLION sites about “How To Design Websites.” Yes, I counted them all (with a little help from Google). So why another website for web designers? It isn’t because I think there should be 370,000,001 websites. It is because I think there is a hole in the Internet. There are thousands of great sites with tutorials and lessons on Photoshop, HTML, CSS, Dreamweaver, JavaScript — you name it, the information is out there for learning about specific languages and tools. That is one of the things I love about web design, the community and mass of information that is readily available. But being an amazing web designer is more than just having the knowledge and skills to create a cool-looking website. An amazing designer knows how to interact with their clients, how to limit project scope, how to properly manage their time, how to invoice customers, and how to be a lifetime learner. An amazing designer understands the balance between usability and aesthetics and knows how to deliver what a client needs, not just what they want, and how to help them understand it. An amazing web designer grasps the purpose of what a website is for: that purpose is marketing. Every aspect of a site should lead the user toward some kind of buy-in. That buy-in may mean that they become believers in your cause or they contact you for your services or purchase your product, but whatever a website is for, it needs to be about convincing the reader of something.
My personal story includes years of stumbling and fumbling to gain a more holistic understanding of web design. Of course, I didn’t realize it at the time, and that is the biggest pitfall for any beginner — you don’t know what you don’t know. I have been a professional web designer for 11+ years and for the last five of those years I have been training other web designers. I have always had a knack for teaching, and I hope to use this website to share the knowledge gained from my decade of experience. I want to help others to know what they don’t know.
If you are one of those people who are curious about becoming a web designer, then this website is for you. If you are a beginning web designer and want some help getting a leg up, then this website is for you. If you are an experienced web designer, I would love to hear your take on the subject at hand — feel free to join the conversation, and maybe we can help each other. This website is for you.
I hope that any web designer will be able to find benefit here, but I specifically want to engage with web designers who own their own business or freelance designers, because I think good information on how to run your own web design business is particularly lacking on the Internet. So if you are doing freelance web design on the side, or you are doing it full time on your own, then this website is especially for you.