Commentary from a Web Designer
Originally published at Rob Layton's Freelance Portfolio v3. Please leave any comments there.
When I started this blog, I knew, at some point or another, that I was going to document my personal life. Two problems: the first being that I couldn’t legally publish anything about my job or my workplace, and the second being that, since I spent the majority of my days there, remaining options were limited. Writing about the routine banality of school would bore me and the reader, and relationships were totally out of the question. So I decided that I was going to dig back, and begin where everything started - my birthplace, the Philippines. It will be a collective process that I do not plan on giving up. Track those articles, titled “Relocation.” For now, I’m going to fast forward a little to focus on my prospects for the future of my field of work.
I’m a Web Designer. It’s a field dedicated to research, problem-solving, functionality, interaction, usability, computation, and integration. It’s logic-driven, language-heavy, and highly challenging. I think the biggest mistake most of my peers make is waiting until after college to jump into their career. If you think there isn’t anything you can do, that nobody will take you seriously until you have your degree, I guarantee that you’ll have another excuse down the road. Intern, volunteer, learn a skill. Let me repeat that last part. Learn a skill. I’ve never accomplished anything with wishes, alone. Goals don’t become real until someone initiates the first step. By the time I have my degree in Digital Interactive Systems, I’ll have 5 years of experience as a graphic designer, and 4 years of experience as a freelance web designer.
You won’t see many ads on this website because it serves as my online portfolio and as a hub for clients to login and monitor the progress of their websites. I plan on integrating more of a user-based model, with a community-rich interface and an emphasis on web design. As clients grow to understand the usability of dynamic websites, more and more of my projects will be implementing databases and privileges for the administrator. My ultimate goal is to create websites that require little to no future maintenance for the web designer. Clients will be allowed to update their pages with a user-friendly system, and on their own time. One may wonder what affect this will have on the web designer’s profits. I believe it will increase them, as well as the credibility of their field. More clients will be looking for better models for their websites and that will, in turn, nessecitate more skilled designers and programmers. There are plenty of run-of-the-mill, mediocre html coders looking to pull a fast one on their customers, and that does nothing but compromise the integrity of the job title. Web designers need to practice proper and ethical means of operation if they’re ever going to get away from clients paying them like bargain bin employees.
