In our last article “Internet Businesses You Could Engage in and Make Lots of Money From” we talked of several businesses one can engage in.

In the forthcoming series of articles, I would be giving you a summation of each of the businesses, but,  in the training section we would delve deeper into each of them.

The first on the list I would be writing about is Website design or Web development

So What is Website Design or Website development 

Web design or Web development is the process of planning and creating a website. Text, images, digital media and interactive elements are used by web designers to produce the page seen on the web browser.

Many people use the two terms “web design” and “web development” interchangeably, but they really do have two different meanings.

Web design is the customer-facing part of the website. A web designer is concerned with how a site looks and how the customers interact with it. Good web designers know how to put together graphic images, texts, fonts so the site looks visually appealing, they also understand usability and how to create a site that customers want to navigate around. Website designers know the basic code of website design which is HTML. They create mostly static pages and know very little about the website programming languages which include ASP, PHP, or databases.

A Web developer also called Web programmer, on the other hand, , is someone who programs Web pages. A Web developer is more focused on the way a website works than how it looks. They typically use HTML text editors and work with databases and programming languages as well as HTML.

Web developers have the following skills and know the following  web languages or code: HTML, CSS, JavaScript and Ajax, PHP, ASP, Java, Perl, or C++, MySQL Database, Project management. 
Companies looking for Web developers are looking for people with strong programming skills that can build and maintain websites that function well.

If you want to be self employed and to really succeed in the business as a website designer, you must be good in both design and development. i.e. You should have a good understanding on website languages and code which include HTML, JAVA, PHP, PERL, etc.  However you do not need to know all.

To climb up the ladder, first learn how to be a good website designer, and then become a good web programmer or web developer and you would be highly sort after.

Tools Needed

Website designers use various tools or software. I would only be listing the popular ones:

1. Your personal desktop computer or laptop (preferably running Windows  OS)
2. WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) is a software for creating webpages. In the past, raw code was used in creating webpages, this was cumbersome hence software which allow you to import images, write texts, etc  were created and the popular ones include: Adobe Dreamweaver (Formerly Macromedia Dreamweaver), Microsoft Front page, Adboe Creative Suite, etc
3. WAMP or XAMP which converts your computer to a local host very much like a server or webhost and allows you to create webpages connected to a database
4. FTP software for uploading your files from your computer to your remote server
5. Remote server- This is paid web-space provided for by a web-hosting company
6. Credit or debit card or means to pay for web-host

This depends on your skill, art of negotiation and environment or location of doing business.

The range for one website could range between N35,000 ($200) for small or static page websites – N1,500,000 ($10,000) or more for complex or interactive websites

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Samuel Oritsejimi Iyinbo

Samuel Oritsejimi Iyinbo has been making money online since 2003 as a website designer with over 60 clients and counting, an internet business consultant, serial entrepreneur and spiritual teacher where he disseminates spiritual messages The Roving Messenger. He founded Illumination Concepts’ E-learning Centre and Innovation Hub the Internet Business Academy Nigeria, to share his knowledge and to train people on how to make money online.