No doubt just about one of the most misinterpreted and generalised expressions within the IT field today has to be the term 'Web-Designer'? Web Design takes on board a number of different aspects, & a good understanding of these facets can help anyone thinking of getting in to the marketplace. Fundamentally, there are 2 key sides to web-design; the creative element and the technical side. Many people assume a web designer is somebody who designs the visual aspects of the site. Basically, they view web-site designers as artists in the main. The truth is every web-designer's function is an inter-related mixture of 'technical' understanding and design creativity - & the two are becoming quite hard to split up. It will become more obvious how things fit together if we break the work down in to it's different roles.

First, we've got graphic-artists, who design and construct the graphic icons and images that we see on any website. Strictly speaking, graphic-artists aren't really web-designers. More commonly they are multimedia artists who employ software like Adobe 'Photoshop' & Flash to create their finished results. The majority of graphic artists have been to university or college, with a qualification in art and design. Clearly, this particular work requires a good artistic bias.

Secondly, there are the web site designers, that work with design-environments such as Dreamweaver to produce the lay-out and feel of the website. They take the work created by the artist, & alongside their clients generate an initial look and 'navigational' structure for the brand new webpage. An amateur web designer often starts with the 'form' of a site, rather than the function. However, you should essentially start with a grasp of the functions it needs to carry out to develop a really productive web site. Is it largely an e-commerce website, which really needs to have the facility take payments securely, or is it perhaps a web based product or service catalogue listing? Or maybe it will consist of a lot of video and heavy graphics. On the other hand it could be principally an info site, where it's necessary to offer easy access to relevant web pages of copy. Basically the web-site must have the capacity to meet its needs - whatever those requirements are. There is little value in creating a visually exciting web site that's difficult for anyone to navigate! The purpose of any professional web designer is to first & foremost design an event that people enjoy & are happy with - so they return again and again.

Its important to appreciate that even the finest web design courses can only show you the methods and processes - none of them can actually turn you in to a bona-fide web-designer. As you work on your training course, take some time to put together and develop a large range of your own web-sites to build a portfolio of your work. A craft or interest is a very good starting point, or perhaps your favourite dog, or a holiday resort you especially loved. Build an interactive web site, & start building traffic towards it. Every little thing you do will enhance your CV, and prove more to a company than just an 'Adobe' certificate.

Obviously you will find cross-overs with many of these tasks - we ourselves have interactions with a number of web-site designers who're skilled in most of them. But that degree of knowledge takes quite some time to master. A web design program then that can prepare you to get into the workplace should include the following - A briefing of the basic fundamentals of web design first of all, then straight on to using 'Dreamweaver' to a professional standard & the principal nuances of Flash as well. Next you must understand the 'coding' languages HTML & 'CSS', and then be trained in a synopsis of how e-commerce works. PHP should be learned so that dynamic websites can be designed (ASP.Net is far more involved, & PHP is more straightforward to get into at first,) and a simple understanding of Databases & 'SEO' should be achieved. All this is basically to get to a level of ability technically where you are able to deal with a broad enough array of web sites. Similar to when you were learning to drive, you must first learn the physical competencies, before you can essentially push beyond them & achieve a certain amount of finesse. A thorough program of this sort would probably involve approximately four to five hundred hours of part-time practice & study and can therefore be successfully accomplished part time over a year. Detailed planning to obtain the best training course for your needs is a great investment of your time - knowledgeable career experts will help you to sort the best route for you before you decide to start.

Web 'developers' are the most technically trained of all. These people will not just know HTML, 'CSS' & XML, but will have also learned more official programming-languages like PHP, ASP.Net, VB, C#, Java and the like. And since most contemporary sites of any size store their information using 'SQL' Database technology, they are likely to have got a strong grip SQL also. In reality, its unlikely that a large E-commerce site has been put together in lay-out format by a team of web-site designers. More usually, following the formation of a place-holder 'template', the material will be taken from a database & dynamically inserted. This makes not only the construction, management and updates hugely more straighforward, it also produces a more consistent web-site.

Some other skill sets that are relevant to web designers in the commercial marketplace are a good grasp of E-commerce and project-management. Another field - that is not to be under-estimated - is 'SEO' (Search Engine Optimisation). This concerns how to optimize website indexation on Search Engines like 'Google' and Yahoo. And of course, we shouldn't forget the web server administrators and installers that sit behind the scenes making sure everything works; although they generally come from a network administration background.

The most important resources employed by web designers are the design environments, with 'Adobe Creative Suite' (currently in Version 4 as of 2009/2010) being the most popular commercially. Whilst 'Adobe Flash' provides access to interactive and animated graphical content material, Dreamweaver is the software program that builds web sites. You could actually state that 'Dreamweaver' is the Word Processor of the Adobe Creative Suite series. Graphics and text can be displayed (within certain limitations) & then a basic interactivity can be created via page-linking. 'Dreamweaver' (as with any web-design environment) creates 'HTML' ('Hyper Text Markup Language') program code in the background. Basically, this language of web-browsers is a 'script' which draws & controls the web page being watched. Associated with HTML are the layout 'tag' 'languages' like CSS and XML. These enable more stream-lined 'HTML' code and more efficient lay-out techniques, that will work on multiple-platforms (because they're 'standardised'). The idea being that the web-page will look exactly the same on any internet browser, whether it is 'Mozilla Firefox', Internet Explorer, 'Safari', Opera or whatever. So although you're placing graphic-blocks & text, behind the scenes, Dreamweaver is turning this into 'code'. It is important to have an in depth knowledge of these types of 'languages' if you would like be a web designer at the commercial level.

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