Surely one of the most mis-understood & over-worked titles within the IT sector these days must be the words 'Web-Designer'? Web Design includes a lot of distinctive aspects, & a good understanding of these can help anybody wanting to get in the industry. There are fundamentally two elements to web-design - the 'technical' process & the creative design side. To the person in the street, a web designer is somebody that designs the look and 'feel' of a web-site. Basically, they view web-site designers as artists in the main. But in fact, within modern web-design it is getting more and more difficult to split up the technical side from the creative aspect, as both of them are so inter-twined. It will become more evident just how things sit together when we break the profession up into its various roles.

Graphic artists should come 1st - these people design and create the icons and images for a web page. They most often make this happen by utilising graphic layout & animation software (such as Adobe 'Flash' and 'Photoshop'), and are generally not actually web site designers as such. Frequently, they will have an art background, and may well have undertaken studies at university or college level. This particular element is a lot more about creative expertise than any other function.

Then we have the web-designers, who create the layout & overall 'feel' of a web-site by using a design-environment like Adobe Dreamweaver. They take on the visuals created by the artist, and together their client produce an emerging look & 'navigational' structure for the new web page. A lot of novice web designers place emphasis to start with on the format of the web-site, rather than its 'function'. In order to create an effective web site though, it is vital that you first of all look at what you essentially need the website to accomplish. Is it largely an e-commerce web-site, that wants to have the ability to take payments safely and securely, or is it perhaps an on-line product or service catalogue listing? It could be you'll want to showcase products and solutions by means of video & a heavily graphical inter-face, or perhaps its mostly an 'informational' website where the need is simple access to key text information (such as this particular website.) Regardless of what you require from a site, it must - at it's simplest level - fulfil the 'function' for which it's intended. Such a lot of web sites look brilliant but are a headache to navigate and get where you'd like - & so visitors move on and never return. A professional web-designer must basically create an online experience that's both pleasurable and instinctive for those coming to the web site - that way they will visit again and again.

Several of these roles can and certainly do crossover of course, we work with several free-lance website designers who each cover almost all of the previously mentioned jobs. Nevertheless, it will take quite some time to develop that level of expertise. An appropriate professional web design training program then must instruct on a number of things: First of all, an introduction to basic web design, followed by teaching in Adobe 'Dreamweaver' & a synopsis of the key elements of Adobe Flash. The languages of 'HTML' and CSS should be taught next, with a certain amount of e-commerce training included here. Some Database and 'SEO' knowledge is essential, and an awareness of the programming language PHP (instead of the more complicated ASP.NET) so that you can create dynamic sites. All this is merely to reach a standard of competence technically whereby you can cope with a wide enough array of websites. The physical competencies have got to develop first, before you fine tune them to a natural and flowing style - a lot like when you were learning to drive a car. You'd probably have to give yourself something like 400-500 hours to study & competently master a broad-ranging training program like this - so if your plan is to get this done along with employment it could be completed within one year. As there are numerous points to consider, it's well worth finding the time to look carefully at any training-programs you're interested in. Talk to a person with industry knowledge who can help you sort things out.

The key resources utilised by web-site designers are their design-environments, with Adobe Creative Suite (presently in version 4 as of 2009/2010) staying the most popular commercially. Whilst Adobe Flash gives access to animated & interactive 'graphical' content material, 'Dreamweaver' is the software which builds sites. You might say that Dreamweaver is the Word-Processor of the Adobe Creative Suite range. Within certain rules & parameters, it helps you display text and graphics, & then through a process called 'page linking' you can create basic inter-activity within the website. As with other web design-environments, 'Dreamweaver' produces the program code 'HTML' behind the scenes ('HTML' is short for Hyper Text Markup Language). It's the language of web-browsers, and is a script which essentially 'draws' & controls the web page you're viewing. Along with HTML are the layout tag 'languages' - like CSS & XML. As these 'tag' languages are 'standardised', the smoother and more efficient results function successfully on many different platforms. What this means is the web-page will appear the same on Microsoft 'Internet Explorer', 'Mozilla Firefox', Opera, Safari etc. (or shall we say, that's the plan!) And so although you're laying graphic blocks and text, in the background, 'Dreamweaver' is converting what you're doing into 'code'. A thorough knowledge of these 'languages' is very important if you're to be a commercially-viable website designer.

Web-developers are the most technically trained of all. Not only will these people understand the languages above, they will also have studied additional languages, such as 'C#', Visual Basic, 'PHP', 'Java', ASP.Net and so on. Quite a few also have a very good understanding of SQL, the database language - because the data on many large modern sites is stored in this particular 'language'. A typical E-commerce web site does not have a crew of web designers who've produced it's thousands of pages in layout format. More usually, after the construction of a place holder template, the contents will be extracted from a Database and dynamically inserted. In addition to being hugely more efficient to construct, manage and up-date, it also helps with the feel of the web-site staying consistent.

Further skillsets which are very useful for professional web-designers are an understanding of project management and e-commerce. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is another discipline that handles how a web-site is indexed with Search Engines - to ensure that it may be found more easily (this is almost an entire job in itself.) And in the background but vitally important are the web server installers & administrators that make sure that the whole thing operates smoothly. Officially speaking they are network administrator professionals though.

Its important to appreciate that even the best web design programs can only show you the techniques and processes - not one will be able to convert you in to a bona fide web designer. As you work on your training course, make an effort to construct & develop a good selection of your own websites to create a portfolio of your work. A sport or interest is an effective place to start, or simply your favourite pet, or a holiday-resort you especially enjoyed. Start interactive sites & create 'traffic' to them. Anything you do will add to your CV, & present more to an employer than just an Adobe certification.

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