10 Essential Technologies Every Web Designer Should Know

I have been creating web pages and web sites for about ten years. Part of my job as an instructional designer at a community college is creating web pages/web sites for our faculty members. When I started building web pages there were no good web design programs such as Dreamweaver, so I learned to build them in HTML code. I will always be glad I learned HTML before I learned programs such as Dreamweaver and FrontPage, because I understand how web pages are designed from the ground up and I can always "look under the hood" when I have to fix a problem.

I have been thinking a lot lately about which software programs/technologies every person who wants to be a serious web designer should learn. This is my first attempt at putting together this list, and I may make changes in it from-time-to-time. I would be interested in reading comments from my readers about which web design technologies they think every web designer should know. Here are my top ten, in no particular order:

1. XHTML
2. XML
3. DOM (Document Object Model)
4. Javascript
5. Dreamweaver
6. Flash
7. PHP
8. Ajax or Ruby with its application developer Ruby on Rails
9. Photoshop
10. CSS (Cascading Style Sheets)

In future posts I will comment in detail about all these technologies.