VOX: The Voice of Our Generation

As VOX is a great place of opportunity, they offered me a chance to shadow a specialist in my career interest area. I followed CNN’s Director of Web Operations (and VOX alumnus) Simit Shah around to discover what a Web designer actually does. I asked him many questions about finding a career in the field and what it takes.

Simit oversees the coding, design and content for CNN’s many Web sites. In college he majored in Computer Engineering. At the time, Simit wrote an article for Georgia Tech’s newspaper about how GT's ticketing system was so bad. After that, GT’s administrators came to him and asked him to fix the system. The first thing he said should be done was to build a Web site, and that's how he got into Web design.

Surprisingly, he told me that a diversity of career backgrounds could ultimately help you in becoming a Web designer because you can use the basic skills from those careers to figure out problems while building a Web site. You don’t even have to be a wizard at coding; Simit told me sometimes, the only thing needed to figure out a problem is to look it up on Google.

Being a Web designer doesn't mean you have to dress formally every day either. At CNN, many of the web developers dress casually with jeans and maybe a semi-formal polo shirt. I’d expected to see Simit's team at work and how they did the hand-coding by themselves. On the contrary, Simit only gave me a look at his desk and described what he and his team did. He did show me how he managed CNN’s Web sites with tools such as HomeSite and the Firebug extension from Firefox.

It’s really wonderful how Firebug can figure out different problems in a variety of codes from HTML to CSS to JavaScript. These are the basic code languages in Web design. Another interesting thing about Firebug is that if you want to figure out how someone did something on a Web site, you can open up Firebug and inspect the element on that page to see the actual code. It can probably save a few minutes each day trying to figure out small problems.

Almost everything during my job shadowing was like I expected. Overall, the experience sparked an even greater interest in Web design in me. I got a first-hand experience of discovering the problems they have to face. It was pretty much like figuring out a puzzle all day, and I love puzzles.

If you're interested in Web design, there are many internships available for teens and college students. Just check with your counselor for available positions. If you are a beginner at Web design, the best thing for you to do though is to start learning HTML, CSS and JavaScript. HTML is pretty basic and can take a small amount of time to learn. However CSS and JavaScript can be a little more advanced. At first it may just be basic coding, but eventually you can form the languages into applications and graphics. If you're in college right now, you should also try doing different things in computer information technology. Learning just the basics of even game programming can help you in Web design.

In the end, what Simit told me benefited me more than anything I would learn in a classroom.