TGIF – Thanks (Al) Gore it´s Friday. Friday is the 5th day of the week. This means it´s time for my column “5 Reasons why”.  This column will give advice to aspiring designers who want to be successful. And I´ll give you 5 very good reasons why you should think about following this advice. Today I give you…

…5 reasons why web designers should be able to code.

There are many web designers who just design web-interfaces in Photoshop and have no coding knowledge. Some use tools to export their design to html, some let other people do the job and others send their stuff to services who take care of that, which often is a mix out of the first two options. But if you want to be a professional and have future in this business, you should learn how to code a website. It´s not all about the design.

Number one: Know what´s (im)possible

You can be as creative as you want, you can have visions of how a website should look and feel – but without coding knowledge you will not be able to understand the possibilities and limitations of your work. Imagine yourself as an painter with a paintbrush. You´re talented. But if you don´t know how your canvas reacts to different paint or brush types, the picture won´t look like your vision, will destroy the paper or will have poor quality. That said, I don´t want to say that it´s impossible to design good websites without coding knowledge. But you will not be able to bring every vision to life… and if you´re serious about web design you should be able to do that or know that it´s not possible beforehand.

Number two: Be independent

With little or no coding knowledge you will always have to depend on someone else to bring your monsters alive. Even if you use a tool to export your design from photoshop to html, you will depend on the developer and that he continuously develops the tool into a direction you want it to be. You may not realize it, but if someone else codes a site you designed, he usually put at least as much effort into it as you did. I think it would be great if you could take all the credit for your work for yourself.

Number three: Take opportunities

Yes, the Internet is huge now. But you will also have to deal with clients that don´t spend much time on the Internet. There are many companies that still have no website and that have no one on their staff that is an Internet expert. To them, you are often not only the handcrafter of their web presentation but also the contact for all things internet. While talking about design stuff they will also ask you about other things like SEO, Content Management, dynamic content, Advertising, Updating Sites from their mobile phone or via E-Mail and a lot other stuff they read or heard about in the news. You might even be able to answer their questions in general. But it would be better for your business if you could offer  to do this job for them as well. Companies who employ web designers usually do not employ people without coding knowledge. If they do, they are a) big, and have an own development department or b) don´t care because they don´t know better.

Number Four: Feel the difference

Why are those rude Internet-people always bugging you for using a tool instead of writing code? There are many Reasons. Better Accessibility, better SEO, better usability, better troubleshooting. You understand what that means, but do you understand WHY it is like that? Do you know how search engine friendly code looks and why it is better than yours? Do you know why people call the code of your exported website a mess? How often did something not work as you wanted it to? Fixing the issue in an export tool from Photoshop or something else is often try and error, playing with options. Or worse: the tool is bugged and you can´t do anything with this design, because you don´t know how to make it into a website now. What if you could just take a look at the code, find the bug and smush it? Of course sometimes – especially when you start to code – fixing the code will be try and error too, but in the end it´s always logical. That shouldn´t frustrate you, because that´s where you learn more about how websites work. And THAT has more future than any tools, cause in the end it´s all html.

Number Five: Maintaing a site – heroic mode.

Sooo you made a design, worked in content, linked  everything, exported it and the site of your client is finally online. You are done, right? Right, YOU are done. But that´s where the trouble starts for other people who have to maintain the site and might have to implement other features in the future. A generated html page  might look the same as a version that someone else handcoded. But the code certainly doesn´t. There are multiple ways to achieve the same look, but like with almost every part in life, there´s a right and there´s a wrong way to your goal. By making your life easy you will make the life of someone else hard. Generated code is usually far from human logic and makes it hard to work with a site after it went online.  And that´s not the only downside, because if something you built isn´t easy to work with, that client probably won´t suggest you to others or, even worse, tell other people about his bad experience with you that cost him as much money as he saved by choosing a designer that doesn´t charge for coding, because he doesn´t code.

That´s it for the 5 reasons this week. I hope you enjoyed the read and that i could help some people with it.