What gives you better job prospects web design or web development?

Question

I am in the UK i am studying a web design course in oct and after the course i will be a web designer but i want to know which area i should focus on

Answer 1

Definately if you are creative and have knowledge of professional tools such as adobe photoshop, flash cs3, you can get a lot of work from your home also you can work as a freelancer.

But if you are opting for web development than if you want to be modern developer than you can go with learning microsoft technologies such as asp.net, silverlight, linq,aspnet ajax etc or the most famous one such as php thats also a challanging field but as you say that you are doing web designing course so why not stick with it and give your designing a professional touch as there is a lot of work around in designing part.

See these websites.

1.www.getacoder.com

2.www.rentacoder.com

3.www.scriptlance.com

Hope this helps

Answer 2

IF you want to make a living, abandon "web design": it pays 10£/page, and turn into Web Application Development.

This means A LOT of learning (several languages to start with)

Applications are complex programs that just happen to run on a SERVER (the Web!), so several users are accessing the same code.

YA! is one of these.  If you can develop YA!, then you are an Application Developer, and that pays well (50k+/y).

Start on LAMP servers (Linux/Unix, Apache, Php, MySQL): you only need (X)HTML, javascript, AJAX, Php, mySQL, and you can aquire the basics of these in a year or two.  Stay away form any Window servers, ASP, JSP and anything "dot Net".

IF, on the other hand, you are good at "Arts", become a GRAPHIC designer (like those making adverts, paper or TV).

You can just make the "design" and get paid for it (a good logo design can pay pretty well, especially once you are known!).  Join hands with a Coder and let HIM do the coding!