web page copywriting
To be a good web designer is it also necessary to be a good graphics designer?

I know there are lots of other things that comprise a good web page besides graphics.
Good coding practices, good copywriting, SEO, optimized usability and so on.
But I`m wondering whether a lack of graphic art ability is a severe handicap to a career in web design.
I should add that I`m already pretty proficient with CSS and XHTML. Even know a bit of Javascript and PHP.

But the idea of designing a Logo or a Header for a web page makes me break a cold sweat!

Well, there’s web design, and there’s web development. Those are very different (if related) occupations.

Web designers are obviously concerned about design. It’s in the job title. They’re the folks who spend a lot of effort on the visual appeal of the web site, and what they do is important.

However, there’s a whole lot more to the web world than the design aspects. Most modern web sites aren’t just documents anymore. They’re dynamic programs which respond to the user, aggregate data from a database, and build a page on the fly, applying a visual style to that page.

The designer is usually involved in the last stage of the process. The person who analyzes the problems, the person who builds the database, the person who writes the back-end code, and many others are involved in the development of a web site, and most of those folks don’t have to have a lot of design background.

If you’re trying to create a web firm on your own, it’s good to have a mix of design and the technical aspects. However, if you only have one side, maybe the technical aspects are more convenient. It’s a lot cheaper to hire a designer than it is to hire a database expert or computer programmer.

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Filed under: Copywriting

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