If you’re thinking about a career—either choosing one or making a different choice—you may be wondering if you should look into becoming a web-designer.
Let’s take a quick look at pay, satisfaction, and what the work entails before discussing if you think you might be suitable for the work.
Salary
Should You Become A Web Designer?
If you’re looking for a well-paying job, then web design offers a well-paying job a good choice. You can expect to take home $45K a year. On top of this, bonuses average around $4K while a profit sharing plan averages around $9K. Starting out you may make $27K, but the pay scale can go up to as $71K or more. You can also get benefits; for example, medical and dental.
Satisfaction
Since the work is artistic and creative, the majority of web designers surveyed reported high job satisfaction. They really enjoy the intricacy and the detail of creating beautiful things.
Description
As a web designer your job is to create the look-and-feel of a website. You will be responsible for all the visual aspects of a website, including how people viscerally respond to it. The impact of your design will depend upon your choice of images, layout, color scheme, and fonts.
A Good Career Choice for the Right Person
So should you do it?
It all depends on your aptitude. It can be a great career for someone who has intrinsic motivation—they have the right talents, interests, and aptitude.
While, it definitely has extrinsic rewards as a job, if there is not enough intrinsic motivation you will not enjoy it.
A Quick Pop Quiz
While web-designing does offer interesting, well-paying work, take a moment to look at these five questions to see if this is something that you will enjoy doing as a career. If you do well in this pop quiz, then you definitely have an aptitude for it and should enroll in web design classes.
1. Do you like working on the Internet?
Most designers love the Internet. They love to web surf, use social media, and review how people have designed their websites. If you are not fascinated by the Internet, then designing for the Web may not be for you.
2. Do you love art?
While you don’t need to be good at drawing or painting to be a web designer, you do have to have a love for art. You must have an appreciation for beauty, which is a keen aesthetic sense for beautiful things.
Web design is artistic, it’s a digital art form, and you must appreciate how colors, symmetry, images and text work together.
You must be able to see at a glance if something is symmetrical, harmonious, and pleasing to the eye.
If you don’t like to fuss over details, then you may be too impatient to meet client expectations.
3. Do you like doing layouts?
Web design is not primarily focused on graphic design or the way words sound. Instead, while you may be working with images and text, you are more concerned with how everything is laid out. You are interested in the overall composition. Writing and photography skills are helpful, but are not necessary.
4. Do you think of yourself as a technophile?
In the modern world, there are two kinds of people: technophiles and technophobes.
When Steve Jobs was overseeing the design of the first iPhone, he said that it had to look so good that people would want to lick the glass. That’s a technophile: someone who loves everything about technology.
Conversely, there are people who wish typewriters were back and that dial up phones had not become museum curiosities. These are the technophobes. They view technology as some kind of cultural aberration and long for the good old days.
As a web designer, you’ll be exposed to a lot of new technology—both hardware and software—and you should enjoy working with technical things that you may not immediately understand. You should be willing to learn how new devices and new apps work.
4. Do you like learning computer languages?
While it is not at all necessary to learn computer languages like HTML or CSS, and you can do fine using WYSIWYG editors, it will help your career.
Although you will not be required to do any coding since most companies hire programmers to do the coding, a familiarity with computer languages will give you an edge when you’re interviewing for a job. It’s not a necessary skill, but a nice one to have.
5. Do you like to work in a team?
Unless you choose to be an independent contractor, you will probably work with other professionals to create digital products and services for clients.
You’ll work with other designers, graphic artists, content writers, programmers, and Web producers a lot.
You may also have to work with the client directly to understand what they’re looking to do with their website.
Again, it’s not necessary to be a people person, but if you are too introverted, you may not enjoy the working environment.
How Did You Do?
If you were able to say “yes” to at least half of these questions, then you may very well be suited for this kind of work. If you had an enthusiastic “yes” to all of them, then this is the perfect career path for you!
