Dur­ing my work­ing life I have picked up and been form­ally trained in vari­ous skills. Some of these gradu­ally fell away as I moved through my career but some have stuck fast and these are the essen­tial skills that I use on a reg­u­lar basis when devel­op­ing and design­ing web sites.

1: Learn to use a pen­cil and paper

Never under­es­tim­ate the flex­ib­il­ity of using ‘ancient’ draw­ing tech­niques, espe­cially dur­ing the devel­op­ment and design pro­cess. I won’t go into too much detail other than to point you to a won­der­ful example of this by David Perel.

Also, check out how Joanna Halton used a note­pad helped with devel­op­ing a social media strategy.

2: Learn HTML

It’s always sur­pris­ing to me how many web design­ers rely on WYSIWYG soft­ware and pre-designed tem­plates without fun­da­mental know­ledge of how HTML works or even what the basic tags mean. Use as many aids as pos­sible to get the work done as effi­ciently as pos­sible, but you really need to know what is going on in the back­ground just in case some­thing goes wrong or you need to ‘pop the hood’ to make modi­fic­a­tions that can’t be handled by your soft­ware of choice. For some primers on the sub­ject, check out the tutori­als at W3Schools or HTML Code Tutorial. And keep an eye on cur­rent devel­op­ments such as HTML 5.

3: Learn CSS

As with HTML, CSS is one of the basic build­ing blocks for web design. No mat­ter what devel­op­ment plat­form you use, CSS will be used to con­trol not just the visual design but some of the func­tion­al­ity as well. Again, learn the fun­da­ment­als — there are plenty of online tutori­als such as those at W3Schools and Web Design Lib­rary. It’s also amaz­ing what can be achieved with good CSS — check out the tips and examples at CSS Zen Garden and A LIst Apart.

4: Learn to code (a bit)

If you are going to design for plat­forms such as Word­Press you really need to get a grip with the under­ly­ing code, whether it is a gen­eric code such as PHP or vari­ations that are spe­cific to the plat­form. I’m not say­ing you need to be an expert, but if you know how to modify the code and under­stand how this code affects the design can only make you a bet­ter designer.

5: Learn to learn

This is one of the hard­est things to do, but also the most reward­ing. Make sure you set aside time to learn a new tech­nique or brush up on the basics. Mix self-training through online or off­line tutori­als with paid train­ing. I have a goal where I try to learn some­thing new every day (I don’t always man­age it, I tend to aver­age four things a week) — find some­thing that works for you. Don’t for­get no mat­ter how hard you try you can’t be an expert in everything, so don’t be afraid to ask for help if you need it!

These are what I con­sider the essen­tial skills needed for suc­cess­ful web design, they have helped me since I first coded a web site using Note­pad in the late 90s. Let me know what skills have become essen­tial to you!