Hi all, I have a question for all the web designers in here. How long did it take you before you felt confident enough in your skills to do work for clients and charge for your services? Also what services where you offereing at this time? Just curious, Thanks.
2 years working professionally. then, 2 years decided to go freelance. You need to build up a portfolio before someone will want to hire you. I used to do it for free just for the sake of the portfolio at the start.
I'm pretty interested in SEO as well as web design. Do you think it is unrealistic to try and do both at the same time? Or learn both for that matter...
It's a great idea to learn SEO and web design as both together will offer your clients great value. The SEO skills will increase your client's web traffic. All the best. Gabriel Irowa
around 2 years did a design for myself then asked people to review it.. most of them gave positive feedback and it made me more confident..
I learned in 2 years. I focused on HTML, Flash, PHP and MySQL. I would learn design first and than work on SEO. If you understand HTML before starting SEO, it will make learning SEO much easier. In general, SEO consists of 50% on-page optimization (making your webpages search engine friendly) and 50% off-page optimization (quality links pointing to your site from other sites).
it probably depend to the what software you'll be using. photoshop and illustrator is way hard to learn than inkscape and gimp which do the same thing. take away the dreamweaver for its sometimes useless today for people today dont want to have static pages for theyre now like dynamic pages and there are lots of free scripts today like wp. what designers do now are the templates.
Well I have been learning for about 4 months I'd say. I am good with photoshop and used to design websites in photoshop for years, but I'm talking automatic table designs, not even looking at code. I stopped doing all that and came back to it. In the 4 months I've been learning I am ok with CSS and XHTML now I can use them, not completly without problems but I feel confident enough. I know the basic practices of SEO learned through books I have read. And I have learned how to use Joomla through hours and hours of lynda tutorials. I am about to start my first Joomla site this week and do an SEO campaign for it so I'll see how that goes. Once this is finished I am not really sure what avenue to go down, I was thinking JavaScript and jQuery but maybe PHP? I'm not sure....
My current goal is to learn to design wordpress theme by myself. However, it seems very complicated to learn by myself with no experience in html and phd.
I learnt when I made my business website, which I spent about 40hours on in total - it was quite a simple site too! In that time I read up about all the best practices, found what software to use and started to learn about SEO. 2 Years later and I'm still learning loads but then I am a part time designer.
Why don't you spend some time learning HTML then? PHP expertise I don't think is an absolute when designing wordpress. But read a book on HTML it will help you out a lot in the long run.