Web Designer

Career Area: Information Technology

Occupation Group: Front-End Application Design

Salary

Percentile wages tell how much a certain percentage of an overall population in a geographic area or within a given industry or field makes. The percentile wage estimate is the value of a wage below which a certain percent of workers fall.

An example would be the 25th percentile, 25 percent of workers employed in that occupation earn less and 75 percent earn more than the estimated wage value. At the 75th percentile, 75 percent of workers employed in that occupation earn less and 25 percent earn more than the estimated wage value.

A typical Web Designer earns the following wages (national and state):

State

The average salary in North Carolina for those pursuing this career is $61,283

National

The average salary in the United States for those pursuing this career is $61,242

What Does a Professional in this Career Do?

Creates design for websites, including layout and graphics. Integrates applications or other content as needed for a site. May also write web design programs.

Employment Trends

The job demand and job growth statistics shown here were derived from job posts over the past year. Expected job growth projections are extrapolated from year-over-year job post listing history.

Job demand and job growth is expected at the following rates:

Skills

A professional in this position typically utilizes the following skills in the course of everyday work in this exciting and challenging field:

Baseline Skills

The following are baseline skills every Web Designer is expected to have in order to experience success in this field:

• Creativity: Mental characteristic that allows a person to think outside of the box, which results in innovative or different approaches to a particular task.
• Communication Skills: The ability to convey information to another effectively and efficiently.
• Teamwork / Collaboration: Experience working in collaborative efforts with a team to achieve a common goal or to complete a task in the most effective and efficient way.
• Detail-Oriented: A detail oriented person is someone who pays attention to the details and can make a conscious effort to understand causes instead of just the effects, and that does this in a second nature type of way.
• Problem Solving: Problem solving consists of using generic or ad hoc methods, in an orderly manner, for finding solutions to problems.

Specialized Skills

These skills are specific to working in this career:

• Web Site Design: The term web design is normally used to describe the design process relating to the front-end design of a website including writing mark up. Web design partially overlaps web engineering in the broader scope of web development.
• Adobe Photoshop: Adobe Photoshop is a raster graphics editor developed and published by Adobe Systems for macOS and Windows.
• Graphic Design: Graphic design is the process of visual communication and problem-solving using one or more of typography, photography and illustration.
• Adobe Illustrator: Adobe Illustrator is a vector graphics editor developed and marketed by Adobe Systems.
• JavaScript: JavaScript (), often abbreviated as JS, is a high-level, dynamic, weakly typed, object-based, multi-paradigm, and interpreted client-side programming language.

Distinguishing Skills

Any Web Designer that possesses the following skills will stand out against the competition:

• Adobe Dreamweaver: Adobe Dreamweaver is a proprietary web development tool developed by Adobe Systems.
• Animation: Animation is the process of making the illusion of motion and the illusion of change by means of the rapid succession of sequential images that minimally differ from each other.
• Bootstrapping: Working experience of Bootstrapping, which refers to a self-starting process that is supposed to proceed without external input. In computer technology the term usually refers to the process of loading the basic software into the memory of a computer after power-on or general reset, especially the operating system which will then take care of loading other software as needed.
• Web Content Management: Web content management (WCM) is an application for creating, storing, managing and publishing web page content, which may be in the form of text, audio, graphics, video, etc.
• Cross-browser: Working experience of a Cross-browser, which refers to the ability of a website, web application, HTML construct or client-side script to function in environments that provide its required features and to bow out or degrade gracefully when features are absent or lacking.

Salary Boosting Skills

A professional who wishes to excel in this career path may consider developing the following highly valued skills:

• Information Architecture: Information architecture (IA) is the structural design of shared information environments; the art and science of organizing and labelling websites, intranets, online communities and software to support usability and findability; and an emerging community of practice focused on bringing principles of design and architecture to the digital landscape.

Experience

This position typically requires the following level of experience. The numbers presented in the pie charts below were derived from actual job posts over the past year. Not all job postings list experience requirements.

Common Job Titles

It is possible to find work in this field in positions commonly listed as the following job titles:

• Web Designer
• Website Designer
• Senior Web Designer
• Interactive Development Designer
• Graphic And Web Designer

Similar Occupations

If you are interested in exploring similar occupations, you may want to research the following job titles:

• E-Commerce Web Designer
• Web Developer
• Web Content Producer