What is web designing?

Website designing or development has two facets — creative and technical. The creative aspect involves visualizing and conceptualizing. While, technical aspect takes care of converting the designed layout into HTML, giving it effects with Java Scripting and using AJAX. The initial step of creating a website starts with the web-designer surfing the Internet to take ideas from other websites or using his own creativity, creates a design template. After the client approves the design, the technical phase of the site starts.

The pay
For web practitioners who do not have a degree, the average starting pay is around Rs 10,000 to 15,000 per month. However, for graduate web designers, the pay is about Rs 2.5 lakh per annum. For someone at the mid-management level, it is about Rs 9 lakh per year, which also same for a graphic designer with a team of three to five people and a Master’s degree. For someone at senior level, it comes to around Rs 18 lakh a year as a creative director. For a graphic head, at GM/VP level, it can reach to about Rs 27 lakh a year. With 12 years’ experience, a person can lead a team of more than 10 people.

Required skills
Imagination, imagination and loads of imagination. Along with willingness to experiment, learn and grow. Aptitude to understand a brief clearly and thinking of original and creative solutions.
Analytical thinking is also important. Team spirit is an important aspect as designing is not a solitary activity, it involves a number of tools and professionals.

How do I go about it?
After HSC i.e class XII, one can join a web designing course conducted at many institutes. To become a designer, one needs to learn all about the web, HTML (HyperText Mark-up Language), PhotoShop, Dreamweaver and Flash, CSS (Cascading Style Sheet, for managing content formatting) and at least one programming language such as ASP, ASP.NET or PHP.

Web Designers India

The web is about to enter a new decade - Web 3.0 - which is currently making waves.

There is always an engineering focus on either 'the front end' or 'back end' of the Web , and this happens decade after decade. Web 1.0 was a back-end decade, Web 2.0 was front end, with a heavy focus on users and usability, clean-looking sites, and people making connections with one another.

In Web 3.0, the emphasis will revert to the back end, with a renewal of the web's key index - the essential data that is catalogued by search engines like Google. That in turn will make way for Web 4.0, another 'front-end decade', only with more advanced programs than the likes of Facebook.

A prime example of a Web 3.0 technology is 'natural-language search', which refers to the ability of search engines to answer full questions such as 'Which US Presidents died of disease?' In some cases, the sites that appear in the results do not reference the original search terms, reflecting the fact that the web knows, for instance, that Reagan was a US President, and that Alzheimer's is a disease.

"Our engine reads every page of the web sentence by sentence and returns results by drawing on a general knowledge of language and what specific concepts in the world mean, and their relationship with one another," said Barney Pell, chief executive of Powerset, which is developing natural-language technology. The firm, based at the prestigious Palo Alto Research Centre, in California, is sometimes talked about as a Google-killer, should its offering - which is not yet widely available - become popular.

It's not just search that will be overhauled in the web of the future, however. One of the recurrent themes in the presentations at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco was 'open platforms', the idea that a website or device, like a mobile phone, should be able to accommodate whichever features or applications its user wants. Think of the iPhone as a folder into which an owner could 'drag and drop' any application - a weather forecaster, an e-mail service - without Apple having to approve such an action.

Some of the world's largest technology companies - Nokia, Apple and MySpace - all made announcements embracing the idea of open platforms, suggesting that the web will become a place where much more mixing and matching of different services will be permitted.

Alongside this will come more mature virtual worlds, or what Silicon Valley's faithful - perhaps to get away from connotations of the computer game - have started referring to as 'immersive environments'