3 November 2023
Work as a Web Designer: Do a Web Design Internship
It’s official – we all have the attention span of a gnat.
When a web page takes just one second longer to load it can result in 11% fewer views and greater customer dissatisfaction. Consumers expect a site to load in less than two seconds.
With more websites than ever before and countless other distractions, yours has to grab the attention of users instantly or you’ve already lost them.
This has made the work of web designers more important than ever.
- Why web designers are important
- Why you should pursue a career in web design
- Relevant university degrees and skills
- Work experience for web design students
Why web designers are important
Web designers are vital as they need to marry the need of interesting, eye-catching and user-friendly layouts, graphics and fonts with technical ability, to ensure pages are usable, accessible and navigable for the benefit of customers.
Without web designers, many sites would probably still look how they did way back in the nineties.
Thankfully we’ve come quite a long way since the days of scrolling banners, rainbow-palette colour schemes and endless GIFs.
Why you should pursue a career in web design
One major reason to go down this path is because web designers are always going to be in demand in the IT industry.
In fact, with more people online than ever and more sites scrambling for their attention, web designers are becoming more prized, making now a good time to climb the wagon!
Web design also balances the need to be technical with the need to be arty and creative; if you’re passionate about everything IT-related and have an eye for the aesthetic, you can indulge both of your interests in this sector.
While you can’t necessarily turn someone with IT skills into an artistic genius, you can teach a designer about technical aspects of websites. So this career potentially suits people with a background in design or graphics.
Relevant university degrees and skills
University courses that may be relevant to this career include multimedia web design, web design and development and graphic design with a digital focus.
With the amount of graduate vacancies in IT & Telecommunications rocketing by more than 77% since last year, combined with an average starting salary of about £30,000 for qualified students, the career prospects are certainly appealing.
Skills
People who work as web designers need to come armed with top-notch communication skills in order to find out what’s actually expected from the site and what the brief is, as well as the ability to research and plan out the structure down the tiniest detail.
Knowing how to use web design software like WIX, Adobe, WordPress and Figma is extremely useful and will help you secure a role…
Work experience for web design students
There’s no substitute for experience, so to make yourself employable it really is worth undertaking a placement or information technology internship.
If you are a first year university student but want to gain some industry exposure, you should consider a shorter insight scheme, in order to give yourself an idea of what the work is like.
Companies that offer work experience, placements or internships include major technology players like HP and Samsung, while all businesses with an online presence need designers.
