The term 'Web-Designer' is quite possibly one of the more over-used and misinterpreted labels within the IT market. In truth, web design does contain a number of different aspects, and so it may well help to clarify things when we go through each one. Web-Design involves the technical elements of a successful website along with the creative aspects. Most people believe a web designer is someone who is responsible for the visual areas of the site. Which means a 'web designer' is basically an artist who has had some 'technical' training. However, a commercial web-designer will in fact be as occupied with the 'technical' element of things as much as the creative side. If you break down web-design in to it's component roles, then it will become much more apparent how everything fits together.

Firstly, we've got the graphic artists, that design and assemble the graphic symbols and pictures that we find on any web-site. They most often bring this about by utilising graphic layout & animation software (such as Adobe Flash & Photoshop), and are not strictly web-site designers as such. The majority have been through further education, with typically a degree standard art background. Clearly, this job calls for a keen artistic flair.

Then there are the web-designers, who generate the layout and overall feel of a website by using a design environment like Dreamweaver. Bu utilising visuals from the graphic artist, they'll build the 'navigational' composition of the web-site, keeping in touch with the clients to make sure that the 'feel' meets their needs. Many amateur web-designers place emphasis first on the 'format' of the web site, rather than its 'function'. And yet, you should really start with an understanding of the functions it needs to carry out to create a truly successful web site. Perhaps it is essentially an online catalogue, or an e-commerce web site where merchandise are offered there and then. Quite possibly rather like this site the chief function is simple access to pertinent details, or maybe it's going to be a show-case for products and solutions by means of video and a heavily 'graphical' interface. No matter what the client would like from a website, the basic necessity is that it addresses the basic specification. So many sites look fantastic but they are a nightmare to navigate and find what you need - & so users leave & never return. The purpose of any good web designer is to first & foremost design an experience that visitors enjoy & are relaxed with - so that they come back again.

A lot of free-lance web-site designers can carry out several of these functions by themselves; in fact we work with quite a few who are able to quite frequently. However, it takes time to develop that amount of skill. An ideal professional web design training-program then has to teach several things: A basic introductory tutorial to web design, followed by how to utilise Adobe 'Dreamweaver' and gain a basic understanding of Adobe 'Flash'. The languages of 'HTML' & 'CSS' should be taught next, with a certain amount of E-commerce training incorporated here. To construct dynamic web sites it's important to gain knowledge of PHP, which is an easier programming-language to get into than ASP.Net. In addition , you need a basic understanding of databases & 'SEO'. The reason why you need all these elements is they will give you the technical grounding to work on all sorts of site builds. The physical skillsets have to develop first of all, before you finetune them to a natural flowing style - much like the time you were learning to drive a car. A thorough program like this could involve about 400 to 500 hours of part-time study (& practice) & can therefore be successfully concluded part time over 12 months. A professional advisor will be able to assist you to plan your path through this labyrinth of professional training, & we recommend that you take the time to plan your route with care before you begin your training program.

The most important tools utilised by web site designers are the design environments, with 'Adobe Creative Suite' (now in version 4 as of '09/10) being essentially the most popular commercially. Dreamweaver is the software program which builds web sites, with 'Flash' delivering usage of interactive & animated graphical content material. 'Dreamweaver' might be looked at as a 'glorified' Word Processor in many ways. It allows you to lay graphics & text in accordance with particular rules and parameters, and then produce basic interactivity via page-linking. As with other web design-environments, 'Dreamweaver' creates the program code HTML behind the scenes (HTML stands for 'Hyper Text Markup Language'). It's the 'language' of web-browsers, and is a script that essentially 'draws' & controls the page you are looking at. Layout tag languages like XML & CSS are matched up with HTML. As these 'tag' languages are standardised, the smoother and rather more efficient results function effectively on a number of different platforms. The theory being that the web-page will appear identical on any web browser, be it 'Mozilla Firefox', Internet Explorer, 'Safari', Opera or anything else. So although you lay the graphic blocks and put in the textual content, Dreamweaver is converting this into coding behind the scenes. A thorough knowledge of these various languages is essential if you're to become a commercially-viable web-designer.

Web-developers are the most technically apt of all. In addition to a sound grasp of HTML, 'XML' and CSS, web developers will know other respected programming-languages such as Visual Basic, PHP, Java, C# & ASP.Net for instance. A large number also have a good knowledge of 'SQL', the database language - because the information on many large modern web-sites is stored in this particular 'language'. Most E-commerce web sites are not the result of a large bunch of designers who've created 1000s of pages in lay-out form. More often, following the creation of a place-holder 'template', the material will be extracted from a Database and dynamically inserted. This makes not only the construction, management and upgrades hugely more straighforward, it also produces a far more consistent web-site.

The thing it's essential to grasp is absolutely no training course can actually make a web-designer out of you. The actual course will merely teach all the skills and techniques. All through your training & study, you should spend time constructing & creating as many websites as you possibly can, to prepare and assemble your own portfolio. A hobby or other interest might be a very good starting point, or maybe your favourite animal, or a holiday-resort you particularly enjoyed. You could even create interactive web sites & get 'traffic' on them. Adobe accreditations are useful, but showing how you can use the training says a lot more about you as a web-designer!

Further skills that are very useful for professional web-site designers are an understanding of project-management & E-commerce. SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) know-how is also extremely useful for web experts - this is the art of getting web sites to or near to the top of the search engines for frequently used search terms. And of course, we must not overlook the web-server administrators and installers who work in the background making sure everything works properly; though they typically come from a network-administration background.

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