So You Want to Be a Freelance Web Designer?

3D ANIMATION SOFTWARE :

When your just starting out as a web designer, there is a large learning curve. It's important to start with the basics of html unless you're building an all flash website. Even if you are building a flash site, it's a good idea to learn html. Once you have a firm foundation of html, it's also important to understand graphic design. You not only need to be able to design great graphics, but you also need to know how to save them optimized for the web. The standard resolution for an image intended for the internet is 72dpi. For print, images are usually more like 300dpi.

So You Want to Be a Freelance Web Designer?

Another important thing to learn is FTP (File Transfer Protocol) for uploading files to the hosting account. Not only that, you must know that domain names are not the same thing as a server aka hosting account.

Once you have a solid foundation of html, graphic design, and FTP, I suggest getting a foothold in CSS, Jquery, and basic PHP.

CSS (cascading style sheets)

These are what you use to handle a variety of styling situations. Usually you'll have one main style sheet that sits in the root folder of your website. This controls many aspects of the design such as font size, colors, positioning, background images, margins, padding, and much more.

Adobe Flash

Flash is a software application which allows you to make anything from a simple slideshow to complete interactive web designs. It's incredibly diverse. You can also create complex 2d animations with just a few clicks. It's certainly got a learning curve, and I would recommend studying with several great teachers that you can interact with and ask questions.

Jquery

This is a javascript library with many plugins that is growing in popularity. It allows you to do many of the things that you can do with flash, except you're doing them with javascript. That way it often times even works on an iPhone, iPad, or other mobile device. It's also more search engine friendly than flash. You can create many effects with Jquery. Anything from animation to tabbed menus.

PHP

One of the most common uses for php is the contact form. The php code processes the form, and emails it to the recipient. There are many other uses. It's used a lot to communicate with databases to put and retrieve data.

Key Commands

When you're working with software applications creating multimedia content, it will save you a lot of time to learn the key command short cuts. Just think about it. Instead of always using the mouse to move around, and bring windows to the front etc, you can just quickly hit 2 or 3 keys to make it happen almost instantly.

Landing New Clients

This is often the most challenging part. There are more web designers every day, and the competition can be fierce. You simple need to stick to your guns, and do what you do best. A lot of jobs will come word of mouth. start getting your name out there. Do a few free sites for promo. Whatever it takes to show that you are reliable, and can walk the talk.

I hope this information helped you understand some of the key aspects of being a web designer. Of course this is just from my experience. Everyone masters different skills.

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