How much do web designers really earn? Finding a way to balance a fixed salary with a job that allows you to show your creativity and sensitivity to design is an ongoing challenge for creatives, but it's a challenge that can be overcome with a career in web design. Working as a web designer involves ensuring an excellent user experience on all the web pages of a site, including establishing a color palette, a set of fonts, and other visual themes that match the brand's identity, creating the design, and more. Then, a front-end web developer brings the user experience (UX) design and user interface (UI) design of their website to life with code. In fact, there are web designers who are also dedicated to WordPress templates and the development of user interfaces, and learning a little code never hurts anyone's job prospects.
That all sounds great, but I'm sure you're wondering how much money a web designer makes. Is website design really one of those elusive creative jobs that pay just enough to cover the bills? Yes, there are technology positions that pay more, such as programming jobs, but if you have experience in traditional graphic or print design, making the leap to web design can be a fairly easy transition and you won't need another degree, graduate studies or any other certification. Finally, web designer salaries also vary depending on your geographical area (or the geographical location of the company you are applying to, if you work remotely). Here's a breakdown of how the average beginner's salary varies between the East and West Coast (New York and Los Angeles) and between a city with a high cost of living and a city with a low cost of living (we've used San Francisco and Salt Lake City as examples)).
What if you're wondering what specific skills you'll need to start working in web design and earn these salaries? While we teach you all the skills you need in our Break Into Tech program, an online course that can be completed in three months by dedicating just an hour or two a day to materials, it doesn't hurt to know how to use wireframes for your user interface designs and some basic HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Another factor that brings variability to web design salaries is the fact that web design work is not always a one-time commitment to a company that pays a fixed salary. Yes, it's possible to get a full-time job as a web designer working for a company, but like all creative jobs, web design can be a freelance career, where the amount of income you generate will depend on the number of clients you get, your hourly rate, and the amount of work you're interested in and willing to do. If you love earning a good salary as a web designer, but you also want to flirt with the idea of working as a freelancer, web design can give you the flexibility you need to try both or become a full-time freelancer. If you're only looking for part-time work to generate additional income in addition to a day job (or in addition to being a parent or other domestic job), becoming a freelance web designer is a good secondary option.
And if you're an experienced designer with a lot of creative resources, but you're looking for a job as a presenter that's your main source of income, web design can also meet those requirements. The scalability of web design allows you to achieve the specific income level for your needs, which is as important as the average starting salary. And remember, whether you want to work as a freelancer, or find a full-time job in a company, Skillcrush's Break Into Tech course will teach you the skills you need to do it. During a review of 75,187 job offers related to web designers, the announced salary was included in 29,586 of them, representing 39%.
If you're one of those people and you're curious about what kind of salary web designers earn, you've come to the right place. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) for detailed information on the lowest and highest salaries for web designers. However, if you're interested in the aspect of web design related to web development, consider obtaining the IBM Front-End Developer Professional Certificate on Coursera. As you build a career as a web designer, you can work in different environments with different types of clients or employers.
Professional development is essential to any career path, especially in web design and development, where things change quickly. Discover some states with the highest average annual salaries of web designers in the U.S. Department of State, according to Zippia. Of the 771 web designers surveyed, 449 (more than 58%) said they had invested money in some form of professional development when starting their web design business.
BLS data is one way to dive deeper into the compensation of web designers, but another way to better understand salary in real time is to analyze real job offers and see what compensation organizations are currently offering to fill vacant positions for web designers. I was recently in a live video chat with a group of aspiring new web designers, giving training on how to find clients as a new designer (???? you can find a repeat of that here if you want). In fact, a fairly large part (41%) of these full-time applicants reported in a previous question that they had been in the web design business for less than a year. As a web designer, you can focus on creating a specific type of website, such as a electronic commerce.
