Without doubt just about one of the most misunderstood and over-worked titles within the I.T. field today has to be the term 'Web Designer'? Web Design takes on board a number of distinct facets, & an understanding of these can help anybody considering getting in the industry. Essentially, there are two principal sides to web-design; the 'creative' element and the technical side. The typical PC user considers web-designers determine how a website 'looks' & 'feels'. Many of us might consider a web-designer a sort of 'artist'. In fact the present day web designer's job is an inter-related mix of 'technical' knowledge & design-creativity - & the two things have become very difficult to split up. It will become much more apparent just how things sit together if we split the work down into its different roles.

First, there are the graphic artists, who design & construct the graphic icons and pictures which we find on a website. Most are not strictly web site designers as such, and usually are multimedia artists utilising graphic layout & animation software, (for example Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Flash.) The majority of graphic-artists went to university, and have a qualification in art & design. More than anything else, this job involves a good creative skill.

Next there are the web-designers, who develop the layout & overall feel of a web site by using a design environment like Adobe 'Dreamweaver'. By employing visuals from the graphic-artist, they will develop the navigational composition of the site, working together with the clients to confirm the 'feel' meets their needs. A large number of novice site designers focus to start with on the format of the site, rather than its 'function'. If you want to develop an effective site though, it is important to first look at what you actually want the site to do. It could be an on-line inventory of products and services, or possibly its an E-commerce site which needs to have the facility sell straight from the web page. Perhaps somewhat like this website the key purpose is straightforward access to pertinent details, or perhaps it's going to be a show-case for products and services by way of video & a heavily graphical inter-face. Quite simply the website must be able to meet its required needs - whatever those requirements are. There's little point creating a visually interesting website that's impossible for anyone to find their way around! The over-riding purpose of all professional web-site designers is for people to check out their web site on a regular basis - therefore it really needs to be a relaxed and interesting experience.

The Adobe Creative Suite is regarded as the most commercially popular design-environment utilised by web-designers today. These key tools are currently ('10) on Version 4. Whilst 'Adobe Flash' offers access to animated and interactive 'graphical' content material, Dreamweaver is the software program which builds web-sites. In a great many ways we can see 'Dreamweaver' as a rather fancy Word Processor. It will let you place text and graphics in accordance with particular rules and parameters, & then develop basic interactivity via page linking. 'HTML' (Hyper Text Mark-up Language) program-coding is developed in the background with Dreamweaver, just as with any web design environment. This is the 'language' of web-browsers, and is a script that essentially 'draws' & controls the page you're seeing. Alongside HTML are the lay-out 'tag' languages - such as XML & CSS. These tag languages allow more stream-lined HTML code & more efficient layout methods, which will work on multiple platforms (as they are standardised). The theory is that the page will look the same on any internet browser, be it 'Mozilla Firefox', Internet Explorer, Safari, 'Opera' or whichever. So even though you lay the graphic-blocks and add the text, 'Dreamweaver' is converting this into coding in the background. If you are planning to be a commercially feasible web-designer, you'll have to have an in-depth understanding of these types of languages.

A lot of independent web-site designers can carry out several of these roles themselves; certainly we liaise with a number who can on a regular basis. However, it will take time to develop that much skill. You should be taught a number of things on a commercially viable web design training course: A synopsis of the basics of web design first of all, then directly into using 'Dreamweaver' to a professional standard & the primary technicalities of 'Flash' too. The languages of 'HTML' & CSS should be covered next, with a level of E-commerce training built-in here. To create 'dynamic' web-sites you'll need to gain knowledge of 'PHP', which is a less arduous programming-language to get into than ASP.NET. You also need a rudimentary knowledge of Databases and 'SEO'. All of this is simply to get to a level of ability technically where you are able to cope with a broad enough variety of websites. The actual physical skill-sets have got to develop first, before you elevate them to a more natural flowing style - a lot like the time you were learning to drive a car. You would need to give yourself something like 400 - 500 hrs to study and effectively grasp a wide ranging training program like this - therefore if your aim is to achieve this alongside full-time work it could be done within a year. Detailed planning to get the best training package for your needs is a good investment of your time - knowledgeable career experts will help you sort the wheat from the chaff before you get going.

Further skill-sets which are important to commercial web-designers are a knowledge of project-management and E-commerce. 'Search Engine Optimisation' (SEO) is another field which deals with how the website is indexed with Search Engines - to ensure that it can be found more easily (this is almost a whole job in itself.) And whilst they strictly speaking originate from a network-administration background, we mustn't forget the incredibly valuable role of the web server administrators & installers, who keep the whole thing working behind the scenes.

Its important to understand that even the very best web-design programs can only teach you the methods & processes - none of them can convert you in to a bona-fide web-designer. As you work on your training course, make an effort to put together and develop a large selection of your own web-sites to create a profile of your work. Design websites about your special interest, your family, your favourite music group or even Television show. Build an inter-active web-site, and start generating traffic towards it. Everything you do will add to your CV, & present much more to an interviewer than just an 'Adobe' certification.

The most technically-trained web professionals are often the web developers. In addition to a sound grasp of HTML, 'XML' and CSS, web developers will know other highly regarded programming languages like VB, PHP, Java, C# and ASP.net for instance. And since most modern web sites of any size store their data using SQL Database technology, they are also likely to have a firm grip SQL also. A regular E-commerce web-site doesn't have a crew of web-designers who have created its many hundreds of web-pages in layout form. Instead, a place-holder 'template' will have been produced, and the contents will be dynamically inserted from a Database. In addition to being vastly easier to build, manage & update, it also aids in the feel of the web site being consistent.

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