It's fair to say that one of the more widely interpreted & badly perceived definitions within I.T. is the label 'Web-Designer'. In truth, web design does incorporate a lot of different aspects, and so it might help to clarify things a little if we break it down. Web-Design incorporates the 'technical' elements of a website in addition to the 'creative' elements. To the average man or women on the street, a 'web designer' is someone that designs the look and feel of a site. To put it differently, they see web designers as artists on the whole. But in actuality, within modern day web design it's becoming more and more difficult to split up the technical side from the 'creative' aspect, as both are so inter-twined. It becomes much more obvious just how things fit together if we split the profession up into it's component parts.

Graphic artists should come 1st - they design and build the symbols and images for a web site. Most often they do this by making use of graphic lay-out and 'animation' software (like Adobe 'Flash' and Photoshop), & are generally not actually web designers per-se. Most have been through further education, typically with a degree level art background. Clearly, this particular role demands a strong artistic bent.

Site designers come second - they make use of design-software like Adobe Dreamweaver to prepare and design the 'look' & 'feel' of the site. They employ the actual graphics that are produced by the artist, & talk with their clients to start to create the 'feel' and 'navigational' structure of the web-site. A web-designer with limited understanding would most likely focus on the form rather than the 'function' of a web site. But, to really build a valuable site, you have to begin with an understanding of the things you require the website to actually do. Perhaps it is basically an online catalogue, or an E-commerce site where products are sold directly. Or maybe it will incorporate lots of video and heavy graphics. On the other hand it may be principally an information website, where it's essential to offer simple entry to appropriate web pages of text. No matter what you require from a site, it must - at it's most elementary level - fulfil the 'function' for which its designed. Such a lot of websites look wonderful but are a pain to navigate & find where you want - & so users leave & never come back. The overriding goal of every professional web-designers is for people to visit their site regularly - therefore it really needs to be a comfortable and gratifying experience.

Several of these functions can & do cross over of course, we are involved with various free-lance website designers who all cover the majority of the previously mentioned jobs. You will need time though to acquire such a selection of commercial competencies. A good commercial web-design training-program therefore must teach several things: A basic introductory tutorial to web-design, and then how to use Adobe 'Dreamweaver' and gain a basic knowledge of Adobe Flash. This should then move onto an understanding of HTML & CSS, with some training into the field of e-commerce. Some database and SEO expertise is really important, and a knowledge of the programming-language PHP (rather than the more complicated ASP.Net) for you to construct 'dynamic' web-sites. The reason you will need all these elements is so that you have the technical ability to work on all sorts of website builds. Just like learning to drive, you first have to obtain the actual physical skillsets, before you can ultimately progress past them and achieve an element of finesse. You'd need to give yourself approximately 400-500 hours to study and properly master a broad ranging training-program like this - therefore if your plan is to accomplish this along-side a job it could be completed within twelve months. As there are plenty of areas to consider, it's well worth taking 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.

Web developers are members of this group, and the most technically minded. Not only will web-developers know the languages mentioned above, they will also have studied other languages, such as 'C#', VB, PHP, 'Java', ASP.net and others. Many also have got a good knowledge of 'SQL', the database language - as the information on many large modern sites is stored in this 'language'. The majority of E-commerce internet sites aren't actually the result of a large group of web designers who have built countless pages in layout form. What normally happens is a place-holder template is produced, & the contents are automatically inserted from the database to the website. This process not only makes the building, management & upgrades vastly more straighforward, it equally produces a more consistent website.

The key tools employed by web site designers are their design environments, with 'Adobe Creative Suite' (presently in version 4 as of '09/10) staying the most popular commercially. Whilst 'Adobe Flash' offers access to animated and interactive graphical content, Dreamweaver is the software which builds websites. 'Dreamweaver' might be considered a 'glorified' Word-Processor in lots of ways. In accordance with certain rules and constraints, it allows you to display graphics & text, & then through a procedure called page-linking you can generate basic interactivity inside the web site. Just like other web design-environments, Dreamweaver produces the program code 'HTML' behind the scenes (HTML stands for Hyper Text Markup Language). This is the language of web browsers, and is a 'script' which basically draws and controls the web-page you are viewing. Together with HTML are the lay-out 'tag' languages - for instance CSS & XML. Because they are 'standardised', these can work on multiple platforms to allow more streamlined HTML code & more efficient lay-out techniques. And so no matter which web-browser somebody uses, ('Internet Explorer', Firefox, 'Opera' etc.) the web page will (hopefully) look exactly the same. So even though you lay the graphic-blocks & add the text, 'Dreamweaver' is converting this into coding behind the scenes. If you're aiming to be a commercially feasible website designer, you will need an in-depth knowledge of these 'languages'.

Other skill sets which are highly relevant to web designers in the professional marketplace are a good grasp of e-commerce and project-management. 'Search Engine Optimisation' ('SEO') is another area which tackles how a site is indexed with search engines like google - so that it can be easily found (this really is almost a whole job by itself.) And although they typically originate from a network administration background, we should remember the valuable work of the web server installers & administrators, who keep everything working in the background.

The thing you need to grasp is that no training-course can actually make a web-designer out of you. The program will only teach all the techniques and skills. All through your training and study, you should spend time building and creating as many web sites as you can, to practice & assemble your own portfolio. Your own web-sites can be about anything - the local music-scene, farm pets, a writer you enjoy or even performance cars. You might even create inter-active websites & get traffic on them. Anything you do will enhance your Curriculum Vitae, & illustrate more to an employer than an Adobe certification.

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