There are no hard and fast checklists of skills you need to have for being a web designer. There doesn’t exist a fixed aptitude or personality test required to qualify as a web designer. You just need to possess few skills including the knowledge of a few basic programming languages, design sense and the zeal to experiment and learn. Taking up a course in web designing might prove useful to certain extent, but essentially, you learn yourself and you teach yourself when it is about web design. The Internet also offers you access to a several design portals and the modern software, it proves to be an added advantage.

The first three programming languages that you need to learn are:

HTML

Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML) is a markup language, which is used for presenting the web pages and putting your text on the Web. You can begin to create these HTML pages either on NotePad or any other text editor. It is the first language you need to embark on your journey to becoming a successful web designer.HTML consists of many tags that are are used for each stage of text from the title

</title>

to the start and end of a new paragraph

</p>

and even for an image

<img>

These tags are the ones, which give the hypertext you view on the websites, its format and fonts.  HTML is every web designer’s first tool and also meant for designers who focus more on hypertext.

CSS

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) are used for transforming the HTML code into a web page formatted as per your choice to make it able to appear on the Internet. You can either create or download CSS templates .CSS templates can be created using Adobe Dreamweaver or BB edit or many similar tools. After creating the style sheet, it can be implemented either externally, by embedding it, or by using inline CSS. This can be decided based on how large your website is, and how you decide to maintain it.

JavaScript

JavaScript is a scripting language which is used to give dynamic effects to the HTML pages. You can choose whether to show more text, or the user is taken to a new Website whenever he clicks a link. JavaScript allows  you to make your web page more interactive.

By learing these three basic languages, you have acquired the minimum skills required to become a web designer. Once you  make yourself friendly to these labguages, you can move ahead to learn other programs which will help you make your Website more user-friendly, attractive and optimized to pick up by search engines.

-  Tony Josan - Toronto Software Development