Its reasonable to say that one of the more broadly interpreted and badly understood definitions within I.T. is the expression 'Web-Designer'. In fact, web design does include quite a few different aspects, & so it might help to clarify things a little when we go through each one. Web-Design incorporates the technical elements of a successful website and also the creative elements. The typical computer user considers web-site designers are responsible for how a site looks and 'feels'. Many people will consider a web-designer a kind of 'artist'. Having said that, a professional web-designer will in fact be as involved with the 'technical' side of things as they are with the 'creative' side. We'll illustrate this with greater clarity when we break web-design down in to it's component parts.

Graphic-artists come first - they design and create the icons & images for a web-site. These are not exactly web site designers as such, & in many cases are multimedia artists making use of graphic lay-out & 'animation' software, (like Adobe Photoshop & Adobe Flash.) The majority of graphic-artists went to college or university, and have a qualification in art and design. Most importantly, this role calls for a sound artistic ability.

Secondly, we have the web designers, that utilise design environments such as Adobe Dreamweaver to produce the lay-out and 'feel' of the site. They use the work done by the graphic artist, & along with their client deliver an emerging style and 'navigational' structure for the new site. An amateur web designer tends to start with the form of the web-site, rather than the function. If you want to construct a successful web-site though, it's crucial to first of all look at what you really need the web-site to do. This might be an online catalogue of items, or maybe it is an E-commerce site that requires to be able to sell straight from the site. Possibly somewhat like this web-site the primary function is simple access to relevant info, or maybe it'll be a showcase for goods by way of video and a heavily 'graphical' interface. Whatever you want from a web-site, it must - at its most basic level - fulfil the 'function' for which its intended. There's no point designing a visually exciting web site that is difficult for people to navigate! A good web-designer must essentially develop a web based experience that's both enjoyable & instinctive for the people visiting the site - then they will visit over and over again.

The design environments utilised by web-site designers are their most valuable resources. Adobe Creative Suite 4 is really the most commercially popular in the industry these days (as of 2010). Dreamweaver is the software which builds web sites, with 'Flash' delivering access to animated and interactive 'graphical' content. You could say that 'Dreamweaver' is the Word-Processor of the Adobe Creative Suite series. It will let you place graphics & text in accordance with particular rules and parameters, & then develop basic inter-activity via page linking. 'Dreamweaver' (as with any web design environment) produces HTML (HyperText Markup Language) program code in the background. HTML is a 'script' which in essence draws and controls the web page on your screen. It's the 'language' of web-browsers. Layout 'tag' 'languages' like XML and CSS are paired with 'HTML'. As these tag languages are standardised, the smoother and more efficient results perform effectively on a number of different platforms. The theory is that the web page will look exactly the same on any web browser, be it Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari, Opera or whichever. So even though you lay the graphic-blocks & put in the text, Dreamweaver is turning this into coding in the background. Its essential to achieve an in-depth understanding of these types of languages if you wish to be a web-designer at a commercial level.

Web developers are members of the group, and also the most technically apt. In addition to a sound grasp of HTML, 'XML' and CSS, web-developers will understand other highly regarded programming languages like Visual Basic, PHP, 'Java', C# and 'ASP.Net' for instance. Quite a few also possess a very good understanding of SQL, the database-language - since the information on many large modern sites is stored in this 'language'. In reality, it is not likely that a large E-commerce web-site has been built in lay-out form by a crew of web-designers. More often, following the formation of a place holder template, the details will be taken from a Database and dynamically inserted. This not only makes the building, management & up-dates vastly more straighforward, it also tends to make a far more consistent website.

The main thing to emphasise is the fact that training program alone will not make you a web-designer; it will merely coach you on the techniques. During your study and training, you have got to apply yourself to building & developing as many web sites as you possibly can, to practice and assemble your portfolio. Make websites about a hobby, your dog, your favourite music group or even TV programme. Create an interactive site, & begin building traffic towards it. This will all seem more constructive on your Curriculum Vitae, and in your portfolio, than a qualification from 'Adobe' will!

Some other skill-sets that are relevant to web-designers in the professional market are a good grasp of E-commerce and project-management. SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) know-how is very valuable for web experts - this is the skill of getting websites to or near the top of the Search Engines for commonly used keyword phrases. And even though they technically come from a network administration background, we mustn't forget the incredibly valuable work of the web-server administrators & installers, who keep everything working in the background.

Naturally there are cross-overs with many of these jobs - we ourselves have contacts with quite a few web-site designers who're proficient in most of them. Although that degree of knowledge will take a while to master. A good professional web design program then has to teach several things: A basic introduction to web design, and then how to utilise Adobe Dreamweaver & have a fundamental knowledge of Adobe Flash. This would then move onto a knowledge of 'HTML' and 'CSS', followed by some coaching into the area of e-commerce. To build dynamic web sites it's important to learn 'PHP', which is a simpler programming-language to start off in than ASP.NET. In addition , you need a rudimentary grasp of Databases & SEO. All of this is simply to get to a level of competence technically where you're able to cope with a broad enough array of web sites. The actual physical skill-sets have to come first of all, before you can fine tune them to a more natural flowing style - much like the time you learned to drive your car. An all-encompassing training program like this would possibly take close to four to five hundred hours of part time study (and practice) & can therefore be reasonably finished part-time over 12 months. A professional advisor will be able to help you prepare the right path through this quagmire of commercial-learning, and we strongly recommend that you allow time to plan your path with care before you start your training program.

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