Know HTML?
Someone calling themselves Joel dropped by my site and sent in this question in to me but he didn’t leave his email address for me to reply to so hoping he reads the blog! The question:
Hi, im taking a web design class and was asked to E-mail professional web masters for their opinion on this question: is it necessary for a professional web designer to know HTML coding? I would appreciate your response, thank you.
The answer is YES! Although you are taking a web “design” class, there is not a WYSIWYG editor out there that can do everything you need as a professional, and at some point in time you will find the need to tweak some of the raw code. I started out thinking I could get away with a good program like Dreamweaver for creating web pages, but it’s just that – you are “getting away with it” and sooner or later not knowing HTML is going to come back to haunt you, maybe even keep you from getting that plum client or job offer. I’m not a designer per sé, (I’m a DEVELOPER), I let the client “design” their own pages, with guidelines for them on “good” things to have and the most user friendly way to incorporate their ideas. The 20 years in the printing industry, before the web work I’m now doing, has given me a lot of experience with taking the ideas and visions of a client and translating them to a functional and easy to navigate web site.
Same principles apply: learn the basics (in printing it’s ink+paper+finishing/binding) for the web and to use the printing analogy it translates to html/browser/presentation. Your design class is teaching you about the presentation, but that’s worthless if you can’t get the html to interact with the site visitors browser, it’s just too easy to click on to another site that’s better, simpler, easier to find what you want, rather a web site puts you through too many hoops to find the content you need.
To summarize: learn html along with design, the two are meant to work together and knowing only one will hold you back and make life a lot harder in the long run.