Vivian Ayako Mudavuda

Basic Concepts to Learn Before Beginning Your Website Design. Why become a freelance web designer? Being a freelance web designer offers a fascinating chance worth considering. The flexibility and freedom are attractive. You get to be your boss, set your hours, and make your own decisions. Platforms like WordPress make web design accessible to everyone, even those without deep coding skills. Their user-friendly tools allow you to create beautiful, functional websites with simple drag-and-drop features, removing the need for complex programming. Web design is a fascinating career option for you who want to start your own business. If you have a keen eye for design and creativity and the drive to work for yourself, freelance web design is both profitable and fulfilling in the digital world. Combining flexibility, earning potential, and the no-code and AI revolution makes freelance web design an exciting career choice if you are into a non-traditional and rewarding professional path. In this article, we’ll dive deep into the basics of web designAn-image-of-web-design 1. Must-have Skills to Become A freelance Web Designer To start a freelance web design career needs varThe first thing is to get the basic right, which will be the base that you will build your design career upon. They include layout, navigation, typography, images, and visual elements. Having a decent knowledge of this topic is important. Other than these, you should also understand visual hierarchy, content writing, grid-based layout, and interface designing. Eye for Design and User Experience It is one of the skills a web designer needs. A healthy combination of user interface (UI) and user experience (UX) helps you create beautiful web experiences. Although UI and UX differ, they are interlinked. An eye for design and user interface focuses on maintaining a healthy balance in your design and creating appealing aesthetics. This goes broad, from maintaining visual hierarchy to color theory, using whitespace. UX focuses on the experience visitors have on a website. The principles of UX design help you focus your design choices around your visitors’ behavior. Responsiveness is another crucial part of UX design. UI and UX can be taught through courses, but experience makes the best of it. The more you do it, the better you get at it. The more websites you create, the more experienced you become in this area of the web design process. Coding (HTML, CSS, and JavaScript) Proficiency in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript is helpful for web designers. HTML structures the content, CSS styles it, and JavaScript adds interactivity. You can attain these skills from YouTube videos to interactive courses on Udemy, Pluralsight, and Coursera. It is not a must that you master the language; a basic knowledge of its workaround allows you to build responsive, visually appealing, and dynamic websites tailored to client needs. Prototyping These means making interactive mockup or simulations of website’s layout, navigation, and features. As a freelance web designer, you can prototype to visualize and test your design ideas before developing them. Creating the interactive prototypes allows you to assess the user experience, functionality, and visual appeal. The step-by step process helps you refine and polish your designs, ensuring they meet client expectations and you both stay on the same page. Figma is most popular and beloved choices for making prototypes. Understanding of UI/UX Design UI and UX are interdependent terms. UI design or user interface design refers to the process of creating the visual interface for a software application. UX design or user experience design refers to the process of creating the experiences or the interactions that a user has with a product. The principle of UI design is to design the interface between the working of the application or website and the user, meanwhile, the underlying principle of UX design is to keep the needs of the user prior and improve the interaction of the user and the product keeping this in mind. UI/UX design is about designing the entire application or website keeping the user at the center of the design and making sure that your design solves the problems of the user. Communication Skills As a freelance web designer, communication is at the core of your business relationships. Listening attentively to understand clients’ visions and then translating your concepts into beautiful websites is a skill that requires a lot of time and dedication. You should respond promptly, using simple language, and seek clarification to ensure you understand requirements and that clients feel heard. Strong interpersonal skills foster trust and successful collaborations. If you aren’t sure about your skills, tools like Sudo write and Jasper will help you on the communication front. Understanding Design Principles Here are the most important design principles: 1. Balance: it is the visual harmony. Good balance is like trying to create a visual harmony on your website. 2. Alignment: How elements are placed on the website. The most common usage of alignment is with text alignment, making the text written left, center, right, or justify. 3. Proximity: This how close the elements mean how close the elements are to other elements. 4. Repetition: It is creating a pattern in the user’s mind when looking at the user interface. 5. Contrast: It is a design principle where we try and differentiate one or more elements/visuals from others by differentiating them with the help of colors, fonts, typography, repetition, alignment, or anything else. 6. Accessibility: It means designing for everybody, keeping in mind the people who might have some special needs and taking care of those needs in the product experience and interface. Color Theory The study of using colors to convey an emotion, create a visual effect, or change human perception is known as color theory. Within web design, color theory Will be important when you will design your projects because using colors irresponsibly may lead to miscommunicating your message or communicating the wrong message. Color theory helps to start your color palettes. Typography It is a technique in user interface design to create readable, appealing, attractive, and easy-to-eye text for users to read. Typography plays an integral role in a website’s design. Text is the most important form to communicate with the users, sometimes, text is even more important than the visuals itself. User interface designers must focus on this aspect of UI design. The best typography is soothing to the eyes and creates a long-lasting impression on the mind of the user. Choose the Right Tools Choosing the right tools for web design is important; the tools you use will define how flexible you are with your designing skills. The most common used tools are: 1. Adobe Photoshop 2. Figma 3. Adobe illustrator 4. Canva 5. Sketch 6. Wix 7. Adobe in design 8. Adobe After Effects 9. Affinity Designer Responsive Design It is a method of designing where you design and develop your website or app which would adjust itself according to various screen sizes. You should learn how to implement responsive design since it is no more a best practice but essential for the success for the websites or application since now most of the visitors to websites come from smaller screen devices. Practice and Build a Portfolio Build some projects from scratch, Building projects will help you understand the entire process of web design and have something to showcase in your resume. Learn Basic Coding It refers to writing a set of programs in programming languages that would bring your design into a real software product. Having basic knowledge of coding languages such as HTML, CSS, and JavaScript helps in understanding how the design you created will eventually be implemented. 2. Creating a Web Design Portfolio The portfolio is important for attracting freelance web design clients. It is the first impression you make on potential clients. A good portfolio demonstrates your expertise, creativity, and commitment to quality results. It improves your ability to attract potential clients, improving your chances of getting hired for higher-paying projects. If you are not sure of where to build your portfolio, check on Divi and WordPress. 3. Best Tools for Website Building To get started as a freelance web designed, these top website-building tools will streamline your workflow and help you deliver good results: WordPress and Divi If you need to showcase your portfolio and build a website-building business, WordPress is the best. This platform gives you complete control over designing and customizing your site. You can select from various themes and plugins to craft an attractive website that excels in search engine performance. This is because of its SEO-friendly attributes and the abundance of SEO plugins available. It is entirely free and open source, barring the cost of hosting and plugins. For every WordPress website, you will need a theme, and Divi is one of the most versatile options out there. Its user-friendly visual builder is a drag and drop tool that doesn’t require coding skills and allows you to design beautiful web pages easily. Divi is a genuinely innovative website builder. Divi AI is an AI-powered design assistant that can write on-brand text, generate realistic images, write compatible code, and create entire web pages, all with just a simple text prompt. It offers helpful team features to ease your transition from an individual freelancer to a full-blown agency should you find great clients and establish a successful business. Divi Cloud, you can store all your layouts in one place without exporting files. The Ultimate Divi Header and Menu Builder Bundle The bundle provides a comprehensive range of Divi menu components, header templates, and a versatile child theme designed for use on divi websites. It has features including the Divi menus module with added capabilities, the ability to create full-screen menus, Divi Mad Menu for advance menu design options, and a selection of pre-designed headers to elevate and personalize the look of your site. The Ultimate Divi Starter Bundle You can access over 40 new and innovative Divi modules, a professionally designed child theme, unique header and footer designs, a popup builder, expanded theme options, and a collection of premade layouts for different purposes. The bundle enhances Divi’s capabilities, providing a more straightforward and customizable experience. The Ultimate Divi Utility Bundle To optimize the Divi Builder’s capabilities, the Divi Utility Bundle offers comprehesive functions to enhance user experience. The features include conditional display setting, advanced content creation options such as popups and mega menus, additional modules and theme customizations, improved responsiveness, and accessible maintenance mode for seamless website development. Note: The key idea for getting started with Web Design can be explained with these three steps Step 1 understand how the software part works Step 2 know what you want to build and design using the software Step 3: practice what you learned. With web design, you can have a great impact not only on the user’s experience but also in your career. Website design is a dynamic, creative field that combines technical skills with artistic sensibilities. To make in web design, it's important to grasp the foundational concept discussed in this article. Vivian Writes Meta Description: Basic Concepts to Learn Before Beginning Your Website Design.