When people ask me what I do for a living, how to respond is always a dilemma.

To simply declare yourself a 'web designer’ doesn’t really gain much respect. After all, anyone who has sired an academically disappointing teenager claims their prodigy is already building websites for pocket money.

Most of all, 'web designer’ doesn’t really convey the Herculean task of converting the digital glint in a client’s eye into a website that people will actually want to visit -
a task once described as akin to 'kicking a dead whale alone on a beach’ - a deeply unpleasant, seemingly endless, highly laborious and unrewarding task!

Of course, it is not always that bad. It depends on the individual client and how their expectations are managed and, indeed, spotting a dead whale before agreeing to move it down the beach. Just one of the many survival skills a professional 'web designer’ needs to develop.

Even now the web is more than a decade old, people struggle to differentiate between the websites professionals produce and those of a 'gifted’ sixteen-year-old manufactured in their back bedrooms.

For the record, the difference of course is design skills, marketing expertise and technical knowledge.

The software industry is to blame for making it too easy to build a website - in much the same way as it was for the downgrading graphic designers from profession to home hobby. The desktop publishing revolution of the 80s saw anyone who was unemployed and owned a Mac become a freelance designer.

There are now a plethora of software packages that automatically create website from templates. Known as 'your logo goes here’, sites are often sold to unsuspecting customers who find it hard to tell the difference.

Ironically the gap between amateur and professional site has never been greater.

Now, to stand any chance of search engine success a website needs to be hand crafted using a technology called CSS; most amateur sites are build in old HTML table structures.

Sadly, you need to flip the hood and look at a site’s source code to find out which it is. An easier test is to turn off the display of images in your browser settings and see if the site still works.

A professional web designer will understand that a visitor’s reasons for clicking a button are equally important to that button’s appearance. They will also be part psychologist, part magazine editor, part marketer, part PR consultant, part programmer, part project manager, part business adviser and full time internet evangelist. All of which is hard to build into a job title.

I usually solve the 'what do you do for a living’ dilemma by claiming I work in 'new media’ or 'digital marketing’. Far more impressive than 'web designer’, I think you’ll agree. What’s more, it usually prevents any further questioning.

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