So, thinking about taking a dip in the web development and design waters? Good for you! With constant demand and many options for expressing your creativity, it is certainly a career with a great perspective. To help you on your way, we have compiled a list of tips and tricks from established pros that will save you some effort and point you to some essential steps.

Basic education is more than basic.

Starting out by learning some code is the obvious way to go. Wondering which languages to learn first? Go for HTML and a course in CSS, and complement them with JavaScript. Photoshop is another bare bones tool that you need to master as soon as possible. These four skills will cover essentially all of the basics that you need.

However, make sure to expand on that. Taking your initial skill set just a few steps further can give you a huge boost at the start, and one clever go way to go about that is to acquire some “passive skills”. Any gamer will understand the idea: have some solid background knowledge that will complement your “active” skills and allow for achieving better results when you apply them.

One great starting point would be to cement your knowledge of color theory and its application in the world of web design. Colors have marvelous effects on our minds, and you should definitely take advantage of that! To learn more about it, check out this useful article.

Free programs are completely legit!

You needn’t worry about expensive software packs; free tools and expansions can achieve amazing results as well. Take some time to research free resources and download them for your own use.

For example, collect a folder of free .psd or .png files of items you regularly include in your designs. Seek out icons and versatile backgrounds. Browser extensions like those for taking screenshots can be a creative way to make up for lacking samples.

Expand your Photoshop into outer space!

As this Portsmouth web design company knows well, an expert designer needs to always be able to build a custom website that fits each unique brand and business style, and very often you would need to do this pretty much from scratch. That is why your chosen tools need to be as versatile as possible.

Most web designers rely heavily on Photoshop in their work, and for good reason. However, you should go beyond the factory version. Photoshop lends itself well to many expansions and customizations. You can add new brushes, shapes, actions, and pretty much anything you can think of.

New shapes in particular have high productive potential, since you can use them to create your own library of default vectors that you can fall back on for your designs. You can check out an ultimate starter collection of shapes at this link: https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2008/12/the-ultimate-collection-of-photoshop-custom-shapes/

Of course, you could always google for your specific needs, or even play around with creating your own.

Does your text editor speak your coding language?

If you plan to spend your working hours writing lines upon lines of code, you need to make sure that your text editor is as programming-friendly as possible.

Naturally, the choice of one will heavily depend on your operating system, and even your hardware’s capabilities, so make sure you know your machine inside and out. You do not want any incompatibilities pooping up just an hour before your deadline.

Also consider investing in some text expansion apps, so that you have a space for saving snippets of code that you use frequently. Save time by just copy-pasting what you need.

Fancy fonts do make a difference.

A good font choice is often the cherry on the web design cake. It can be the single crucial difference between a sleek, professional look, and an overeager-looking amateurish aesthetic.

Even with all the fire it gets, Comic Sans does have a place: its lack of seriousness could fit wonderfully with a playful interface of a kindergarten website, for example. On the other hand, Courier 12 is heavily associated with film scripts.

Building a large font library will make sure you always have just the typeface you need to give your project a smooth and subtle finish.

How will that look on the user’s screen?

Always remember that your local view and the live web version are going to be worlds apart. Things like different web browsers and different devices can result in a drastically distorted appearance of your project.

Therefore, you need a way to test your build and its accompanying aesthetic in as many environments as possible, and see if they look as you intended them to. Fortunately, there are plenty of free virtual testing grounds that you can use.