Career as a Web Designer

Question

I'm looking to make a career change and I've decided that I want to be a web designer. Are there any Web Designers out there that can give me any advice? Would I have to take some courses or go back to school? Or could I just get the books and teach myself?

Also, what do you like best about being a web designer? Are there any aspects that you don't like? How do you spend your typical day? Are most web designers freelance, or do they work for a company? How do you think the future growth of this industry will be?

Lastly, what programming languages or software would I need to know? I want to design and create web pages, yet I'd also want to learn how to do things like create animation for web pages, and other cool stuff so that I would become a versatile web designer. What do I need to learn (Flash, HTML, Maya, Active Server Pages, etc.)?

Answer 1

The other questions I don't know, since I'm not a web designer myself, but the things you'll need to know are Dreamweaver, CSS, HTML, Javascript, MySQL (possibly), and Flash (possibly). That will get you a good head-start on building a webpage.

Answer 2

These are days of dynamic websites. So, mere static Photoshop / Dreamweaver sites won't help. You would need to learn PHP as well (or ASP.net). Learn to create templates for dynamic PHP scripts, like "smartys" etc. You can get a lot of clients even as a freelancer if you can understand php scripts & can design templates accordingly.