The term Web-Designer is perhaps one of the more over-used & mis-interpreted titles in the IT sector. For anybody looking to get in to the marketplace, an explanation of the different facets ought to help to make things clear. Essentially, there are 2 main sides to web design; the 'creative' element & the 'technical' process. To the average person in the street, a 'web designer' is somebody that creates the look & feel of a web-site. Many individuals will consider a web designer a kind of artist. In fact the present day web designer's work is an inter-related blend of technical know-how and design creativity - & the two are becoming very hard to separate. It will become much more evident how things fit together if we break the profession down into its different roles.

Graphic-artists should come first - these people design and build the symbols & images for a web-site. Most are not exactly web-designers as such, & by and large are multimedia artists employing graphic lay-out & 'animation' software, (for example Adobe Photoshop & Adobe 'Flash'.) The majority attended higher education, with typically a degree level art background. More than anything else, this kind of work calls for a good creative skill.

Web-designers come second - these people utilise design software like Dreamweaver to create and design the visual aspects and 'feel' of the website. They take on the visuals done by the artist, and along with their client deliver an emerging style & navigational structure for the brand-new website. A large number of inexperienced web-designers put emphasis first of all on the format of the web-site, instead of it's 'function'. To develop a successful web site though, its important to first look at what you essentially would like the website to do. It may be a web-based inventory of products and services, or possibly it's an e-commerce web site which really needs to have the ability to sell directly from the page. Or potentially it will have a lot of video & heavy graphics. On the other hand it may be largely an info site, where its necessary to offer simple access to specific pages of wording. Whatever you need from a site, it must - at its most basic level - fulfil the 'function' for which it is designed. There's no value in producing a visually exciting website that's impossible for people to find their way around! A good web designer must basically develop a web based 'experience' that's both interesting & user-friendly for the people visiting the site - that way they'll visit more than once.

The one thing you must understand is that no training-course can in fact make a web designer out of you. The actual course will only cover all the techniques & skills. During your training and study, you should apply yourself to constructing & developing as many sites as you possibly can, to practice & assemble your portfolio. Your websites can be about anything you like - your local music-scene, horses, a writer you admire or even cars. Start to build interactive sites & generate 'traffic' on to them. Adobe accreditations are of help, but showing how you can use what you've learned says a lot more about you as a web-designer!

Naturally there are cross overs with many of these jobs - we ourselves have connections with quite a few web-designers who're capable in many of them. It will take time however to build such an array of commercial abilities. An ideal commercial web-design training program therefore has to teach a number of things: A briefing of the basic fundamentals of web design first, then directly into using 'Dreamweaver' to a professional standard & the principal nuances of Flash as well. Next you need to understand the 'coding' languages 'HTML' & CSS, & after that be trained in an overview of just how E-commerce operates. PHP really should be taught to ensure that 'dynamic' web sites can be constructed (ASP.Net is much more involved, and 'PHP' is very simple to get into initially,) and a basic idea of Databases and SEO should be mastered. Grasping these skills will give you a chance to start working on a good cross-section of web-sites. Much like anything, we need to learn how to do the physical skills initially, and then establish increased finesse by experience & practice. You'd need to give yourself around 400-500 hrs to study and properly learn a broad-ranging training-program of this nature - so if your aim is to achieve this alongside a job it could be completed within a year. As there are numerous areas to consider, its worth taking the time to look closely at any training programs you're interested in. Speak to a person with industry knowledge to help you sort things out.

The most important resources utilised by web-designers are the design-environments, with Adobe Creative Suite (presently in Version 4 as of 2009/2010) staying the most commercially popular. The software program which builds website pages is Adobe Dreamweaver, & 'Adobe Flash' accesses graphical content which can be animated & interactive. You could say that 'Dreamweaver' is the Word Processor of the Adobe CS series. It lets you lay text and graphics in accordance with specific parameters and rules, & then produce basic inter-activity via page-linking. 'HTML' ('Hyper Text Markup Language') program-coding is developed in the background with 'Dreamweaver', just like any other web design-environment. HTML is a script which essentially draws and controls the page on your monitor. Its the language of web browsers. Along with 'HTML' are the layout 'tag' 'languages' - like CSS and XML. As they are standardised, these will work on multiple platforms to allow more streamlined HTML coding and more efficient layout techniques. The idea is that the web-page will look exactly the same on any web browser, whether it's Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer, 'Safari', 'Opera' or anything else. So though you're laying graphic-blocks and adding text, behind the scenes, 'Dreamweaver' is turning what you're doing into 'code'. A thorough knowledge of these types of 'languages' is critical if you're to be a commercially viable website designer.

Professional web designers may also up-grade their offering if they choose to branch out in to areas like project management & E-commerce for example. Search Engine Optimisation ('SEO') is another area that handles how the web site is listed with search engines - in order that it may be found more easily (this is sometimes a whole job in itself.) And even though they technically come from a network-administration background, we should remember the valuable work of the web server installers and administrators, who keep everything working in the background.

Web developers are members of this group, and also the most technically trained. These people will not only know HTML, 'CSS' & 'XML', but they will have learnt 'proper' programming-languages such as PHP, ASP.Net, Visual Basic, 'C#', 'Java' among others. Quite a few also possess an effective knowledge of 'SQL', the database language - as the information on many sizable modern web-sites is stored in this particular language. Most e-commerce web-sites aren't actually the result of a sizable team of web designers who've built 1000s of web-pages in a layout format. What generally happens is a place-holder template is created, and the contents are dynamically inserted from the Database to the website. So in addition to significantly greater efficiencies with the web site build, this method also provides for an infinitely more consistent look and 'feel' as well.

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