Web Development as a Career: Is It Good to Plan as your Carrier?
The job of a web designer is to create functional as well as attractive websites. However, they do more than just design websites. A web designer is integral to any business in the modern world. In today’s rising market of e-commerce sites and business websites of companies, the requirement for a web designer has increased. In this article, I will tell you what you need for becoming a web designer.
If You Want to Pursue Web Development as a Career: Things to Know
If you want to take up Web Development as your career, then you have to know about their jobs, their work environment, what you need to do to become one, their salary, and the job outlook.
Web Developer Job
The web designers are responsible for designing and building websites. They are also responsible for the visual aspect of the site. The technical aspects like the capacity and performance, which helps to determine the speed of a website and the amount of traffic it can handle. Additionally, they sometimes may also write content for the website.
The Duties of a Web Developer
The developers usually do the following things:
- They have to go to meetings with the management or the clients for discussing the design and needs of the website they have to design.
- Creating as well as testing the applications which are to be put on the website.
- Writing of codes using the HTML programming language or the XML language for websites.
- Working along with the team members for determining the types of information which are needed to be put on the website.
- To work with other designers like that of graphics and other departments for determining the layout of the website.
- Integrating the video, graphics, and audio properly within the website.
- To check the website’s traffic.
When a web developer is designing a website, they need to understand the vision of the client so that he/she can make that vision into reality very accurately. They have to build different kinds of websites to meet the requirements of the clients. For example, in the case of a gaming website, it must be able to handle high graphics easily, and an e-commerce site must have an application for making the payments.
There are developers who can manage all the perspective for building a website, while others specialize in some specific aspect of a website.
The given are the different kinds of web developers who specialize in a particular aspect.
Back-End Web Developer
They look after the whole technical aspect of the website. The basic framework for the website is built by these developers and they also check whether they are working properly. They can sometimes confirm the steps to add more pages to the website for other developers. The back-end developers also discuss the major changes done to the website with the management.
Front-End Web Developers
They are responsible for the visual aspect of the website. These developers build the layout of the sites and see that the graphics, applications, and other contents are properly integrated into the website.
They write the programs for the Webdesign using different types of programming language like JavaScript and HTML.
Webmasters
They look after the websites and make sure that it remains updated. Webmasters also make sure that the website is running properly and also checks for any errors like broken links.
The Work Environment
Today, almost 160,500 jobs are held by web developers. The types of companies who employes the most number of web developers are:
- Computer Design Services- 17%
- Self-Employed Web Developers- 16%
- Publishing companies (not Internet)- 5%
- Technical, Management and Scientific Consulting Services- 5%
- Public relation, Advertisement, and Other Related Services- 4%
How You Can Be a Web Developer
The academic requirements for being a web developer changes with the kind of work they do. They require knowledge of graphics design and programming.
The Education Requirement
The educational qualification one need to become a web developer vary greatly. One can do a diploma, to a bachelor’s degree in the field of web design or any other connected field to be a web designer.
In addition, if someone wants to be a more specialized web developer like the front-end developer, the employers usually want someone with a bachelor’s degree in programming or computer science or any other relative stream.
The web developers are required to have a good conquer over HTML programming. Some of the employers may also require the developers to know various programming languages like SQL or JavaScript. They also must know about the publishing tools of multimedia like Flash.
A web developer throughout their career must remain updated about the latest computer languages and tools.
Promotion of a Web Developer
The web developers having a bachelor’s degree can get promoted to be a project manager. This will also depend on their performance.
The Qualities a Web Developer Should Possess
It is very important for a web designer to be patient and to have a great concentration. It is because they need to sit at a computer for hours writing code and designing websites.
A person has to be very creative to become a web developer. They are involved in designing a website and how it should look. This work is not possible if someone lacks imagination.
It is also very important for a web designer to have a very keen eye because even the slightest mistake can ruin the code.
The Salary of a Web Developer
For a web developer, the median annual wage is $69,430. It means that half of the employees of that field earned more than the amount, and the other half earned less. $37,930 was earned by the lowest 10% of the employees and the upper 10% earned more than $124,480.
Median annual wages of the web designers of the top companies:
- Publishing Companies (Not internet)- $75,360.
- Computer designing companies- $68,670.
- Technical, scientific and Management companies- $66,250.
- Public relations and Advertising companies- $66,020.
The Job Outlook
It is expected that the employment for the Web Developers will grow by 13% in the coming 10 years. This is faster compared to the average of the remaining occupation.
The employment will increase for the web developers as the e-commerce market is growing fast. Nowadays, people are more comfortable to purchase online than going to the stores themselves. This has resulted in the companies opening their online store. Hence, the requirements for web developers has increased and will increase further in the near future.
Nowadays, more people are using their smartphones for internet surfing. Due to this reason the requirements of web developers have become high. Web developers now have to design websites for mobile devices rather than computers.
Since a website can be created from anywhere at any time, some of the jobs for the web developers can take them to other countries having a lower wage. But, this practice will soon be abandoned as the cost of managing web developers in many locations is not cost-effective.
Job Prospect
There is a good opportunity of getting jobs for the web developers. Those who have the knowledge of more than one programming language, and some of the digital tools like Photoshop, and Flash have a better chance of getting a job.
Conclusion
As you have understood from the article that Web Development as a Career is very good and has many scopes in it. If you are a creative person and like computers, then you should try pursuing this career. You also have the option of choosing from the various departments of web developers.
The education qualification required is also not that different from other occupations. All you need is a good understanding of computers, their tools, and programming languages.