The Required Skills of a Web Designer

I attempted to research the key professional qualities a web designer should have in the year 2006. It is based on a questionnaire containing 14 statements, and requirements extracted from web design job postings. The participants of the questionnaire, mainly TYPO3 Australia mailing list subscribers, rated these statements on a scale of 5 to 1 (5 is agreeing most and 1 is agreeing least). Following, are the statements.

A web designer must:

• be able to write HTML by hand;
• be able to program JavaScript;
• be able to program ActionScript;
• be able to program using a server side language (such as PHP or ASP);
• be able to structure large amounts of data;
• know the rules of typography;
• know the rules of image editing;
• strictly follow accessibility guidelines;
• strictly follow W3C guidelines;
• strictly separate design from content;
• have excellent writing skills (grammatical);
• have excellent communication skills;
• have excellent organizational skills;
• have the desire to learn and embrace the latest technologies.

Data Analysis

Conclusions

The key qualities of a web designer in 2006 are:

1. Writing web markup;
2. Writing Javascript;
3. Image editing;
4. Creating useable sites;
5. Being standards compliant.

These result is not solid due to the small amount of gathered data: only 5 job descriptions and 13 questionnaire participants.