Surely just about one of the most misinterpreted and generalised labels within the IT field these days has to be the term 'Web Designer'? Website Design takes on board many distinctive aspects, & an understanding of these could help anyone seeking to get in to the industry. You'll find there are essentially two elements to web-design - the 'technical' process & the 'creative' 'design' part. To the average man or women on the street, a web designer is someone that creates the 'look' & feel of a web-site. Lots of people may consider a web-designer a type of 'artist'. But in reality, in modern-day web design it's getting more and more difficult to separate the 'technical' part from the 'creative' element, as both are so inter-twined. We'll illustrate this with greater clarity if we separate web design down in to its component parts.

Graphic-artists should come first - they design and construct the icons and pictures for a web site. They are not exactly site designers per-se, and in many cases are multimedia artists making use of graphic lay-out and 'animation' software, (like Adobe 'Photoshop' & Adobe 'Flash'.) The majority of graphic artists have been to university or college, and have a qualification in art and design. More than anything else, this specific work requires sound artistic skill.

Second, we have the web-designers, who use design environments like Dreamweaver to generate the lay-out & 'feel' of the webpage. They take the graphics created by the graphic artist, & in partnership with their client produce an initial look & navigational structure for the brand new webpage. A web designer with fairly limited understanding may well begin with the 'form' rather than the 'function' of a web site. In order to create a good web site however, it is crucial to first of all look at what you really would like the website to do. Maybe it's effectively an online catalogue, or an E-commerce web site where goods can be purchased there and then. Possibly much like this web site the key objective is simple access to pertinent info, or perhaps it will be a showcase for products and solutions by way of video & a heavily graphical inter-face. No matter what the customer would like from a website, the fundamental necessity is that it actually meets the basic needs. Most people will leave a web site and not go back if it is too tricky to get around - however attractive it appears on the surface. The overriding aim of all good web-site designers is to have people check out their web site regularly - so it really needs to be a pleasant and fulfilling experience.

Supplemental skills that are important to professional web designers are a knowledge of project-management & E-commerce. Another field - that is not to be underestimated - is SEO ('Search Engine Optimisation'). This is focused on how to optimise web site indexation on Search Engines like Google & Yahoo. And whilst they technically come from a network administration background, we should remember the incredibly valuable function of the web server installers & administrators, who keep everything working behind the scenes.

The Adobe Creative Suite is regarded as the most commercially popular design environment used by web site designers nowadays. These valuable tools are now (2010) on Version 4. 'Dreamweaver' is the software that builds websites, with 'Flash' delivering usage of interactive & animated 'graphical' content material. 'Dreamweaver' may be considered a 'glorified' Word Processor in many ways. Graphics & text can be placed (according to known limitations) and then a basic inter-activity can be produced through page-linking. Just like other web design environments, 'Dreamweaver' creates the program-code HTML behind the scenes (HTML stands for Hyper Text Markup Language). 'HTML' is a script which in simple terms 'draws' & controls the web-page displayed on your monitor. It's the language of browsers. Lay-out 'tag' 'languages' like XML & CSS are associated with HTML. As these tag 'languages' are 'standardised', the smoother & more efficient results work effectively on a number of different platforms. Therefore the page looks the same on MS Internet Explorer, 'Mozilla Firefox', 'Opera', 'Safari' etc. (at least, that's the plan!) So even though you place the graphic-blocks and add the text, Dreamweaver is converting this in to coding in the background. Its important to gain an in depth comprehension of these languages to be able to be a web designer at a commercial level.

The main thing to stress is the fact that training program itself will not make you a web-designer; it will simply educate you on the methods. As you complete your training course, make an effort to construct and develop a broad selection of your own sites to create a collection of your work. Build websites about a hobby, your family dog, your favourite band or TV programme. Start inter-active web sites & generate traffic to them. Adobe accreditations are very useful, but how you can use what you've learned says much more about you as a web designer!

A lot of independent web-site designers can carry out several of these roles by themselves; certainly we liaise with quite a few who are able to quite frequently. You will need time however to develop such a variety of professional skills. An ideal professional web-design training program then needs to instruct on several things: A basic introductory tutorial to web-design, followed by how to utilise Adobe Dreamweaver & have a basic understanding of Adobe Flash. The languages of 'HTML' and CSS need to be taught next, with a level of E-commerce training included here. Some database and 'SEO' know-how is vital, and an understanding of the programming language 'PHP' (as opposed to the more complex ASP.Net) for you to build dynamic web-sites. All this is merely to get to a standard of technical ability where you can cope with a broad enough variety of web sites. As with anything, we must learn how to really do the physical skillsets initially, & then develop greater 'finesse' by means of experience and practice. You'd have to allow roughly 400 - 500 hrs to study & competently grasp a wide-ranging program such as this - so if your plan is to do this alongside full-time work it could be done within 12 months. Detailed preparation to obtain the right training program for your needs is a great investment of your time - knowledgeable career experts can help you to sort the best way forward before you decide to start.

Web 'developers' are the most technically-trained of all. They won't only understand HTML, CSS and 'XML', but will have also trained in 'proper' programming languages like PHP, 'ASP.Net', VB, C#, Java and the like. Many also have a solid knowledge of 'SQL', the Database language - because the data on most sizable modern websites is stored in this language. The majority of E-commerce web sites aren't actually the result of a big group of web designers who've built 1000s of pages in lay-out format. Instead, a place-holder 'template' will have been created, & the details will be 'dynamically' loaded from a database. This process makes not only the building, management and updates massively more efficient, it also makes for a far more consistent site.

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