What is it that you need to learn to offer website design?

[TougherThanTheRest]

As a graphic designer I am often asked by clients to design them a website as well as their logo/brochure whatever. At the moment I pass this on to a contact but I am looking to build up my workload and would like to learn how to produce websites myself. Trouble is I am incredibly confused by the whole thing! Do I need to learn coding? CSS? Dreamweaver? Wordpress? Would a course be the way to go or could I teach myself? Can anyone advise or point me in the direction of where I might find out? Very grateful, I am feeling rather clueless at the moment!

Learning HTML and CSS would be essential.

However I'd say WordPress would be a great start, particularly for you as a graphic designer.

I'm currently studying for a degree in web design. You don't have to do a degree to make websites, however it is something which takes years to get good at!

However if what you want is to be able to offer your clients a website, fairly soin, then I reckon for you partnering with another freelancer could be a good option. There are lots of web designers out there who are great at the techie stuff but don't have the graphic design training that you do.

In your position I would focus on learning about how visual design principles differ for the web from print (some things are the same, some are very different!) and find someone else to do the techie bit.

I'll have a think if I can recommend some books / links and I'll come back to this when I'm not on my iPhone!

Not that I'm trying to discourage you from learning how to make websites, it's great fun, you should do it if you want! Just be aware it might take some time :)

You might fond this interesting:

Bridging the Gap: Difference between Print and Web Design

Thanks so much for this, to be honest I would rather stick to what I am good at but it seems to be more and more expected these days that a graphic designer will also know how to do web design - look at any job ad and it's nearly always listed even though to me they are totally separate jobs and skills. Several of my clients have said they would be prefer to give their business to someone who can cater for all their needs, print and online, rather than using several different companies, so it seems as thought this is the sensible way to go for me but I agree it is not going to be a 5 minute thing.

So I am back to the question of what on earth am I looking for to learn this stuff?!

I'm not surprise, that's a really nice site! Someone else suggested that Wordpress is what a lot of people use now so maybe that's the way to go. Thanks for your advice.

Wordpress is excellent for people just starting out and want to build a quick website. When you are comfortable with how Wordpress works you could build your own themes.

Having said that professional web design takes a while to perfect and there are always new technologies you will have to keep up to date with. As mentioned above you will need to know HTML and CSS. What hasn't been mentioned is that you will also need to know how to program, mainly if you want to customise a site. So in addition to the basics, you will also need to know PHP, Javascript, MySQL. There are plenty of other technologies that are used for web design but I don't want to put you off.

Start off with the basics and see how you get on :-)