Freelance Web Design Roles You Should Know
Freelance web designers are creative, digital professionals who fashion out the overall vision and plan for a website. From another perspective, note that freelance web design is less about employing coding or programming to give life to a website. Instead, a web design specialist considers a site’s layout, colour palette, font sent, and visual themes, which are brought to life by a developer.
In other words, web designers are like the architects of the digital world, saddled with the responsibility of drafting à visual plan, for onward execution.
As an African freelancer with a niche in web design, you must know and be comfortable playing several roles in your chosen profession. The tasks cover aspects ranging from hardcore skills to soft skills.
Let us start with the hardcore practices associated with web design roles you’d play as a web designer. While a few of them comprises a technical language, they are essential tools in helping you become a proficient African freelance web designer. These fundamental skills are as follows:
Engaging in Visual Design
Visual design essentially places a high premium on digital products and presenting these elements in a usable form. The core design principles determine the look and feel of a website. As a web designer, your job centres on providing the right mix of these elements to deliver jobs that align with the expectation of clients. Overall, the visual design offers you the opportunity to create mood boards and type hierarchy as well as experiment with web fonts and colour palettes.
Creating User Experiences(UX)
An important part on the journey to becoming a freelance web designer is honing your User experience temperament. UX captures how people rate their usage of a website based on specific indices.UX will help you approach your web design duties from a user-first perspective. The aim of this approach is designing a website that helps users get what they want when they want it, and in the way they want it.
The essentials of UX covers aspects such as researching different user personas, figuring out the most frequented user pathways and building appropriate wire structures for the web pages.
Working with Appropriate Design software
A competent craftsperson like yourself must be conversant with the tools of the trade-in web designing. These tools enhance your roles and capacity in meeting and exceeding clients’ expectations. The norm is for web designs to be carried out in web browsers. You can turn to these tools to lend a helping hand: Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, and Sketch. These resources enable designers to build mock-ups, create assets as well as modify/enhance photos.
Working with HTML
HTML stands for HyperText Markup Language. This language forms the bedrock for creating web pages and associated structures. As an African freelance web designer worth your salt, it is essential to be HTML proficient. This proficiency will prove invaluable in your web design career.HTML is the coding language that puts content in web pages and gives them structure. Therefore, you work with HTML to turn a group of words/commands into tables, paragraphs, headers and footers. You also use this language to obtain interactive content like videos and graphics onto a website.
Employing CSS
CSS is an acronym that stands for Cascading Style Sheets. CSS is the command codes/instructions that instruct browsers to format and style HTML for a web page. As a web designer, CSS enables you to play a role in the creation of an engaging/interactive website. Working with CSS, you can perform several innovative functions, including adjusting colours, changing fonts as well as adding a stunning background.
These hardcore skills form a part of the roles you will regularly be playing. If these skills come as enabling the business of web designing, regard the following soft skills as working on the business and engaging clients:
Time Management
Being a freelance web designer means that you answer to yourself and no one else, except your clients. However, you should not misconstrue freelancing with having all the time in the world to deliver on a job or project. Time is of the essence since you would need to also juggle your personal life issues in the same time frame. Time management entails mastering the art of prioritizing and tracking the progress of any job or project. In this regard, you should be conversant with time productivity tools like Trello and JIRA. The world of web designing is super busy, and you must have a firm grip on your tasks.
Adept Communication Skills
Your freelance web design business stays afloat because your clients get served and are satisfied. Therefore you must communicate effectively with existing/potential clients across various stages. The first stage will entail making successful pitches, built around a solid understanding of the needs of the clients.
Another stage in the effective communication process is offering regular updates on the progress of the projects of clients. You should also show the capacity to incorporate inputs and make necessary adjustments where necessary. So it is vital to hone your writing and your presentation skills, and you’ll be sure to get your point across in every situation.
Business Management/ Financials
As an African Freelance web designer, you should have an adequate understanding of the nature of your freelance business. You also extend this courtesy to the needs of your clients’ business. This financial knowledge will help you set realistic deadlines and create sustainable bottom lines so that you can run a profitable business.
This list is by no means exhausted. The roles of an African freelance web designer will incorporate these functions and many more. The essential considerations will include how and where you can pick up these critical skills. You should also note that the web design world is a constant state of evolution. Therefore, you will need to embrace self-development courses and resources regularly.
