9 things a web designer can’t do without

As a web designer there are certain things that any web designer would need to succeed in developing his or her skills. Below is a list of 10 key things I personally feel a web designer needs. If you know any more then please leave them as comments.

So here goes:

1. Well obviously a graphics design application. Personally I favour Gimp because its fast, reliable, updated regularly, free and easy to use and doesn’t compromise on features when it comes to web design. The worthy alternative to this is the slow, expensive Photoshop (oh did I say worthy, I meant unworthy, yeah I don’t like it, although a lot of other designers do.)
2. Inspiration, no web designer can produce good sites without getting ideas from other peoples sites (that doesn’t mean copy people sites, just get some ideas). There are plenty of sites that you can get inspiration from, personally I use templatemonster.com, csspick.com, cssdrive.com, cssmania.com, wpthemesfree.com and other general browsing, if I see a site design that I like, I bookmark it and come back to it later. Inspiration from other peoples work is how you can improve your skills over time as you start to wonder how they did something on there site and eventually find the answer.
3. Coding knowledge is something that quite a few designers dont take up, however learning how to code can seriously increase the amount of money you can make, people who want sites designed are more likely to go for someone who can do everything for them, not get a design and then have to find someone else to code it.
4. Templates. As you produce sites you will start to become more efficient, you will realise that the site you are creating has a similar structure to a site you have designed before, therefore it is good practise to get that template you did previously and edit it rather than start the new site from scratch. Personally I have created over 100 templates over the past year (website and wordpress), and I am in a position to code websites a lot faster because the template is already made.
5. The Web Developer Toolbar. (download here) A must have tool is the web developer toolbar, it works with Firefox and gives you all the information you could ever need when coding websites and is also handy for seeing how other people have coded their websites. This makes it a lot easier to code and is definitely an important tool to have. Unfortunately, it isn’t available for IE which is what you would use it for, all of those IE problems.
6. Validate as you go along, the worst part for most web coders is that they will create a great looking site that works perfect in Firefox, heck it may even look nice in IE (very unlikely, but one can only hope). Then comes the dreaded part, validating it to W3c standards. This can take up a lot of your time, so make sure you are validating as you go along, this will cut off that annoying period at the end of development when you can’t see what is wrong with a line of code that seems to be correct but W3c says otherwise.
7. XAMMP, If you are creating PHP/MySQL driven sites or designing skins for online tools like Wordpress then installing xammp is a must. It will enable you to create your site or template offline which speeds up development by a massive amount because you don’t need to keep uploading each revision of each file to the internet, it also keeps that project your working on secure during development.
8. Tutorials. Everybody learns how to design or code through tutorials, its just the way that it is done, when you ask a question on a forum and you get an answer, in essence you are reading and using a tutorial. There are thousands of tutorials out there, take a look around this blog and you will find some.
9. And finally enjoy what you do, if you don’t enjoy what you are doing then you are wasting your time. Don’t become a web designer because you heard it pays well because it doesn’t, it is overcrowded with kids trying to make a quick buck by undercutting the proper designers, it gets very frustrating. Life is about enjoyment, if you don’t enjoy something then it will show in the quality of the outcome.