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You may have many reasons to learn web design.  You may choose to design your own website whether you're doing this for fun or to launch a business and make a profit.  Maybe you would like to launch a web design business designing websites for other people.  However, it is important for you to determine what the essential skills that you should learn first are, what skills you can learn later and what skills you may not need to learn at all.  The problem is that you could spend your whole lifetime learning web design so that you need to choose what you want to learn first so that you can put the skills to immediate use.

The heart of any business is marketing and Internet marketing is no different.  You cannot be a successful Web designer unless you know the basics of marketing and design the Web site to match your product/service offering to the needs of potential customers.  It is true that you can use a basic knowledge of graphic design to design a web site but unless you can do a lot more marketing wise to generate business for your customer, there will be very few potential customers for you.  Things like advertising, e-mail marketing and search engine marketing are all integral to a good web site.

Branding and positioning is the process of deciding how the Web site will project the proposed product or service and what kind of communication you will use that can have an impact on a potential customer.  If you focus on creating a strong brand, you will be able to create a unique selling proposition that makes it different from your competitors and makes it easy for your customers to recall.  If you are designing a web site, there is very little point in creating just another website which is much the same as the Web sites of the competition.  People talk a lot of nonsense about branding but, if you create a Web site with a personality that projects a strong impression of the values associated with the brand, you will have achieved many of your objectives.

Finally, to be a good web designer, and there is no point in creating an outstanding website if there is no traffic to the Web site.  You have to attract the right number of visitors to the site of the right kind and profile and create opportunities to convert these visitors into customers.  There are many aspects to building a web site that achieves these business objectives and your Web design must take all these aspects into account right from the beginning.  You should always remember that something like 99 % of the clicks is generated by Web sites that feature on the first page of search results.  A designer who can handle traffic generation is a valuable asset.  Instead of relying on so-called SEO experts or external consultants, the Web designer needs to ensure that right from scratch, the website is designed to attract the right kind of customer and that it is properly optimized for the search engines.

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