5 Things Every Student Should Know before Taking up Web Design
By Melissa Burns
The Internet opens up a lot of possibilities for students themselves while at college. If you have skills and a creative mindset, you may try yourself at web design, and some students manage to pull it off. However, there are a few things you should learn before your make this decision.
1. Web Design Became a Mass Product
Once upon a time web design was a kind of handicraft. Even a bad web designer had special skills that gave him advantage over laymen. Today, it turned into mass production: industry entry barrier is much lower than it used to be, and even a person who has nothing to do with either web or design can easily create his own site using a do-it-yourself solution like WordPress or Joomla, especially if he wants to cut costs. It means that your potential clients have a lot of alternatives to choose from, and if they don’t have a reason to prefer this particular student freelancer to all the others, they won’t do it.
2. You Won’t Earn Much on Your Own
Freelancers can make good money, but this scheme grows steadily less viable in web design, especially if you have studies to consider. According to Magicdust, a Sydney web design company, studios and partnerships generate much greater revenues, even though you have to share with other members. It means that in order to support yourself with web design you have to look for partners and to turn your venture into a full-fledged business – and as a student, you may be not ready to invest so much time, effort and money into it.
3. You’ll Have to Learn How to Sell
You may think very highly of your tech skills, but they alone won’t get you far. Some people believe that word of mouth is enough to get you paying customers, but the truth is, before you get any word of mouth, you need to find mouths that would spread this word – and it means actively seeking out customers. So, you’ll either have to learn how to sell or cooperate with someone who can do it for you – which, again, means a lot of commitment. On the other hand, this knowledge can help you a great deal in future, whatever career you decide to pursue.
4. People Don’t Care about Your Skills
Potential clients are not interested in how good you are at HTML – after all, these days we have kids learning it at school, so for a lot of people have hard time persuading themselves that they have to pay someone for work they can ask their 12-year-old son to do. People don’t care about skills – they care about results. They want something that will either get money into their pockets or keep it there. So if you cannot prove your work is a difference between earning and losing money, you aren’t needed.
5. You’ll Have to Keep up with Tech and Trends
Web design changes constantly. What was considered a good website a couple of years ago looks outdated now – and a site designed 5 or 7 years ago feels like something out of the Stone Age. Keeping up with altering trends, technological solutions, coding techniques and so on is a challenge. It is just like a never-ending college course that you’ll have to take simultaneously with the one you are already taking. Do you have time for it?
This article is not aimed at discouraging you from trying yourself at web design. It just gives some food for thought: do you really want it? Do you have what it takes to succeed in it? If not – do you really need to be yet another mediocre designer?
Author’s bio:
Melissa Burns graduated from the faculty of Journalism of Iowa State University in 2008. Nowadays she
is an entrepreneur and independent journalist. Her sphere of interests includes startups, information
technologies and how these ones may be implemented in the sphere of education. You may contact
Melissa via e-mail: burns.melissaa@gmail.com
