The term 'Web-Designer' is quite possibly one of the most over used and misunderstood labels in the I.T. industry. If you're looking to get into the industry, some details about the diverse facets might help to clarify things. Web Design incorporates the 'technical' elements of a successful website and also the creative aspects. The average laptop or computer user believes web-site designers determine how a website looks & 'feels'. Which means a 'web designer' is basically an artist with some technical training. The truth is the present day web designer's function is an inter-related blend of 'technical' knowledge & design creativity - & the two things are becoming quite difficult to separate. When you break web-design down in to its different tasks, then it will become more obvious how everything sits together.

Graphic artists should come first - these people design and construct the symbols and images for a web site. In real terms, graphic-artists usually aren't really web-designers. More usually they're multimedia artists who employ software such as Adobe 'Photoshop' and 'Flash' to bring about their results. The majority have come from higher education, typically with a degree level art qualification. This part is more about artistic ability than anything else.

Second of all, there are the web-designers, who utilise design-environments such as Adobe Dreamweaver to generate the layout and 'feel' of the site. By using artwork from the graphic artist, they will create the navigational composition of the website, working with their clients to ensure that the feel is right. A web designer with limited knowledge might start with the form rather than the function of a web site. And yet, to truly develop a useful web-site, you should begin with a clear understanding of the things you require the web-site to actually do. This might be a web-based catalogue of goods, or maybe its an e-commerce site that requires to have the ability to sell directly from the site. Or perhaps it'll consist of lots of video and graphics. On the other hand it might be principally an informational web-site, where its essential to supply simple access to specific web pages of textual content. Regardless of what you require from a site, it must - at it's most elementary level - fulfil the function for which it's designed. There is little point creating a visually interesting website that's extremely hard for people to find their way around! The overriding purpose of every good web designers is for people to check out their web site regularly - therefore it really needs to be a pleasant and pleasant experience.

The thing you have to realise is that absolutely no training course can actually make a web-designer out of you. The program will only cover all the techniques and skills. During your training and study, it's essential to apply yourself to constructing & developing as many sites as possible, to practice and build your portfolio. Make websites about your special interest, your pet, your favourite band or even Television programme. You could even build inter-active sites and get traffic on them. This will all appear much more favourable on your Curriculum Vitae, & in your portfolio, than a document from 'Adobe' will!

Supplemental skill-sets which are important to professional web-designers are a knowledge of project-management and E-commerce. 'SEO' (Search Engine Optimisation) expertise is also extremely valuable for web-experts - this concerns the skill of getting web sites to or near the top of the Search Engines for commonly used keyword phrases. And although they generally come from a network administration background, we mustn't forget the valuable work of the web server installers and administrators, who keep everything working behind the scenes.

Web-developers are members of the group, and the most technically minded. As well as an understanding of HTML, 'XML' and 'CSS', web developers will know other respected programming-languages like Visual Basic, PHP, 'Java', 'C#' & ASP.Net etc. Quite a few also possess a good understanding of 'SQL', the Database language - as the data on most sizable modern websites is stored in this particular 'language'. A typical e-commerce web site doesn't have a crew of web-designers who've produced its thousands of web-pages in lay-out form. Rather, a place holder 'template' will have been developed, & the material will be 'dynamically' fed from a Database. In addition to being massively more efficient to construct, manage and up-date, it also helps with the feel of the site staying constant.

The 'Adobe Creative Suite' is regarded as the most commercially-popular design environment employed by web-site designers today. These essential applications are currently (2010) on Version 4. Dreamweaver is the software program that builds websites, with Flash providing access to animated and interactive graphical content material. You could say that 'Dreamweaver' is the Word Processor of the Adobe Creative Suite series. It lets you lay graphics and text in accordance with particular parameters and rules, and then build basic interactivity through page-linking. Just like other web design environments, 'Dreamweaver' produces the program-code HTML in the background (HTML stands for Hyper Text Markup Language). This is the language of web browsers, & is a script that effectively draws and controls the web page you're looking at. Together with 'HTML' are the lay-out tag languages - like CSS & XML. These tag languages enable more stream-lined HTML code & more efficient layout techniques, that will work on multiple-platforms (because they are 'standardised'). So which-ever internet browser someone uses, ('Internet Explorer', Firefox, 'Opera' and so on.) the web page will ideally look exactly the same. And so though you are laying graphic blocks & text, behind the scenes, 'Dreamweaver' is converting what you're doing in to code. If you are going to be a commercially feasible web designer, you'll need an in-depth understanding of these types of languages.

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