Janine,
If I wanted to get started in web design and if things go well enough, do it for a living, is it necessary to get some kind of certification…whether it be in html or the program you use for the webpage, like Dreamweaver? What did you do, did you just start making pages and showing them to people or did you get certified in something first? Just wondering what I should do. Any thoughts would be great Janine. Oh yeah…bought you DW for Dummies book the other day…can’t wait to get into it.
Thanks,
Jim
Hi Jim,
No, there is no official certification in Web design. The best approach is to start doing sites for friends, family, or non profits, and then use those sites as examples of your work to get more clients.
There are also more and more jobs available for web designers. If you search LinkedIn or any of the job sites, you’ll find that people with good HTML, CSS and other skills are definitely in demand.
Thank you for buying my book, but you’ll need more than just one Dummies book to learn enough web design to serve clients or get a job. You should also know that Dreamweaver is a great program, but it is only one of many programs that people use to create websites these days. I also encourage you to learn WordPress and more about content management systems in general if you want to work professionally as a web designer.
Finally, learn everything you can by taking courses — I recommend both creativeLIVE.com and Lynda.com (I have courses on both sites). I’d also recommend that you join professional associations, such as an Adobe User’s Group http://www.adobe.com/communities/, a local MeetUP, etc.
I hope that helps and I wish you all the best with your career,
Janine
Wow Janine, thank you for your response and all your input. I think it’s great that you take the time to answer questions for people like myself that are pretty much clueless in this field. I did buy your Dreamweaver video tutorial on Creative Live from a few weeks back that I refer to all the time while I practice. I just checked out Lynda.com….what a site! Yes, this is something I am very interested in! This may change everything for me! I won’t hold you up anymore, just wanted to say thank you for sharing your knowledge and for your inspiration to keep going!
Thanks,
Jim