Undoubtedly one of the most misinterpreted and over-worked expressions in the I.T. sector today must be the term Web Designer? Website Design incorporates a number of diverse facets, and a good understanding of these can help anyone seeking to get in the market. Web-Design involves the 'technical' components of a successful website as well as the creative aspects. The average computer user thinks web-site designers are responsible for how a website looks & feels. In other words, they view web-designers as artists on the whole. The truth is the modern web designer's career is an 'inter-related' mix of 'technical' know-how & design-creativity - and the two have become quite hard to separate. We can illustrate this with more clarity when we separate web design up in to it's component parts.

Firstly, there are graphic artists, who design & put together the graphic icons & pictures that you find on any website. Most often they accomplish this by using graphic lay-out & animation software (like Adobe Flash and 'Photoshop'), and are not strictly web designers as such. Frequently, they'll have an art background, and may have undertaken studies at university or college level. Obviously, this role calls for a solid artistic bent.

Next come the web designers, who develop the lay-out & overall feel of a web-site by utilising a design environment such as Dreamweaver. They use the actual visuals that are provided by the graphic-artist, & talk with their client to firstly create the feel & navigational composition of the web site. A good number of amateur web-designers focus first on the format of the web site, instead of it's 'function'. But, to actually build an effective website, you need to begin with an understanding of what you require the website to actually do. Potentially its in effect a web based brochure, or an e-commerce web-site where goods are sold directly. Or potentially it'll incorporate a lot of video and graphics. Then again it could be predominantly an info web-site, where it's necessary to supply easy entry to specific pages of text. No matter what the purchaser would like from a web-site, the basic requirement is that it actually fulfils the basic needs. There is no point making a visually exciting web-site that is too hard for anyone to get to where they want! The overriding aim of all professional site designers is for people to visit their website repeatedly - therefore it needs to be a comfortable & fulfilling experience.

The design-environments utilised by web-designers are their key resources. 'Adobe Creative Suite' 4 is the most commercially utilised in the industry these days (as of 2010). Whilst Adobe Flash provides access to interactive and animated graphical content, 'Dreamweaver' is the software which builds web-sites. Dreamweaver may be looked at as a 'glorified' Word Processor in a great many ways. Within certain rules and parameters, it allows you to display text & graphics, & then through a procedure known as 'page linking' you can create basic inter-activity within the web site. 'HTML' ('Hyper Text Markup Language') program-coding is developed in the background with 'Dreamweaver', just like any other web design environment. This is the language of web browsers, and is a script which basically 'draws' and controls the web page you're seeing. Alongside HTML are the lay-out tag languages - for instance CSS & XML. These tag languages allow more stream-lined 'HTML' coding and more effective layout methods, that will work on multiple-platforms (as they're standardised). And so which-ever web browser somebody uses, ('Internet Explorer', Firefox, 'Opera' etc.) the page will (hopefully) appear exactly the same. As a result the graphic blocks you are laying & the text you're including is being converted into code in the background by Dreamweaver. A thorough knowledge of these languages is vital if you're going to be a commercially viable website designer.

Of course you will find cross overs with a lot of these functions - in-fact we have interactions with quite a few web-designers who're capable in a lot of them. But that degree of knowledge takes a while to master. A web design course then that can equip you to enter the work-place should encompass the following disciplines - First, an introduction to basic web-design, followed by training in Adobe Dreamweaver and a synopsis of the key elements of Adobe 'Flash'. Next you need to understand the coding languages HTML and CSS, and then be taught an overview of just how E-commerce operates. To create 'dynamic' sites it's important to have a grasp of PHP, which is a simpler programming-language to get into than ASP.NET. You additionally need a basic knowledge of Databases & SEO. The reason you require all these elements is so that you have the technical wherewithal to operate on all sorts of website builds. Similar to when you were learning to drive, you have to first develop the physical skillsets, before you effectively move beyond them and accomplish a degree of finesse. You'd probably need to allow somewhere around 400-500 hrs to study and effectively master a wide ranging training-program of this nature - so if your plan is to do this along with employment it could be carried out within 1 year. A skilled advisor will be able to help you prepare your path through this labyrinth of professional training, & we highly recommend that you take the time to plan your path carefully before you begin your training program.

Professional web-site designers may also enhance their offering if they choose to branch-out in to areas such as project-management and e-commerce for instance. Another field - which isn't to be underestimated - is SEO ('Search Engine Optimisation'). This concerns how to optimise site listings on Search Engines like Google & 'Yahoo'. And behind the scenes but very crucially are the web server administrators & installers that ensure that everything works efficiently. Strictly speaking these people are network administrator professionals though.

It's essential to appreciate that even the very best web design programs can only show you the techniques & procedures - not one can turn you in to a bona-fide web-designer. Throughout your study and training, you should apply yourself to constructing & developing as many websites as possible, to practice and build your own portfolio. Your web sites can be about anything - the local music-scene, horses, a writer you enjoy or even cars. Start interactive web sites & generate traffic to them. Adobe qualifications are very useful, but showing how you can apply the knowledge says far more about you as a web-designer!

Web developers are the most technically apt of all. Together with being proficient in HTML, XML & 'CSS', web-developers will understand other highly regarded programming languages like 'VB', 'PHP', Java, C# & ASP.Net etc. Quite a few also have got a solid understanding of 'SQL', the database language - because the information on many large modern web-sites is stored in this 'language'. In reality, it's un-likely that a large E-commerce site has been put together in layout format by a bunch of web-designers. Rather, a place-holder template will have been created, and the contents will be dynamically fed from a Database. This not only makes the construction, management & updates massively more efficient, it also tends to make a more consistent web site.

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