What makes a good webdesigner?

Post your thoughts and comments

[Wertigon]

Lately, I've been thinking a great deal about webdesign, and what makes a webdesigner "good" at what he does. However, I've not been able to come up with a good answer to the question. Perhaps it is because a "good" webdesigner takes care to test his/her pages in every browser out there? Or is it because the "good" webdesigner got a fundamental understanding of what the web is? Maybe it's knowledge of all the hacks and tricks that makes that person a good designer? Could it be because the designer is one heck of a graphics artist? Or is it because the webdesigner takes care to validate the code he created?

As you can see, many questions, and most of them probably got more than one answer. So, post your thoughts. What do you think makes a good webdesigner?

[PCInk]

> Only after asking "where did you save the file?"....

I always seem to get the answer:
"I saved it in Word" or "I saved it in Excel"!

[yowza]

"No No No!

Usability and accessability are completley pointless if there is no content or very poor content. ">>>

I don't think that a "web designer" should be responsible for content. It is the client's responsibility to provide the content, which we build the website around.

Part of a good web designer's skills should be the most effective organization of provided content. This involves graphic design; thus, graphic design skills are a major part of a "web designer's" job.

They should also be able to write clean code, create an accessible and intuitive interface, learn fast, and know a lot about all other aspects affecting websites: hosts, search engines, servers, languages, accessability, browsers, operating systems, etc.

[ronin]

It's such a catch-all term, isn't it?

The term "Web Designer" conveys a role which could be as hands-off as sketching out the information architecture of a site or network of sites and delegating / managing the rest of the process, right down to being as hands-on as the entrepreneur who works from home handling content, design, sales, marketing, technical back-end and everything else inbetween.

Ten years after the web got going, shouldn't we have a better ontological schema to describe the possible divisions and overlaps of labour and responsibility that all get jumbled together under the umbrella term "web designer"?

Then we might be better placed to define what the best-of-breed practices are in each discipline and what makes one "web designer" more or less qualified than the next.

[claus]

Whoah, this thread is begging for a marathon post, but i'll try to be brief.

Now, a Web Designer is a Designer that specializes in the Web.

Apart from stating the obvious, this sentence holds the facts that

a) It is about the discipline of Design, ie. not coding, not seo, not programming, not information architecture, not server response time, not profitability, not development. These are separate disciplines. A designer does design.

b) It is a niche within the discipline of Design that deals exclusively with the Web, or Internet. So, you have to be a Designer first, and then you have to specialize in the Web. Not cars, not clothes, not packaging, not television, not food. The web.

So, to be a good webdesigner, one does not have to be a good overall Designer, nor does one have to be a programmer or any other such nonsense. A good Web Designer is simply a person that excels in the application of Design to the Web.

Even within this niche there are niches, and some can apply to other fields than the web as well, eg. Interaction Design, User Interface Design, Graphical Design etc.

I should add that the latter category is the one that most Designers considers that "Web Design" belongs to (imho, afaik, and in my experience).

[gorillacyclist]

Personally I don't see how SEO can be seperated from the design decision.

Surely keyword research and knowing your competition, are all important to understanding your market and target audience, ans should be done before you start designing your site.

Also the point of a site is to make money (most of the time) for your client how can this be acheived without effective market research and seo?

Yes design, usability is important and also that important human quality that makes the user feal at ease communicated trust and leads to a sale/posative outcome

P