It is fair to state that perhaps one of the most broadly interpreted and badly perceived definitions in I.T. is the expression Web-Designer. For anybody wanting to get into the market, an explanation about the diverse aspects ought to help to de-mystify things. You'll find there are essentially two elements to web-design - the technical process & the 'creative' 'design' part. The majority of people believe a web designer is somebody that is responsible for the visible areas of the website. Meaning a 'web designer' is essentially an artist with some technical training. But in reality, in modern-day web design it's getting increasingly difficult to separate the 'technical' part from the 'creative' aspect, as both of them are so inter-twined. It becomes more apparent just how things fit together when we split the work down into it's component parts.

Individuals who design and put together the pictures & graphic-icons to go on a web-site are generally known as graphic-artists. Strictly speaking, graphic artists ordinarily are not really web-designers. More usually they are multi-media artists who utilise software such as Adobe 'Photoshop' and 'Flash' to create their results. Often, they will have come from an art background, and may well have undertaken studies at university or college level. More than anything else, this role involves a good artistic skill.

Next there are the web designers, who produce the layout & overall feel of a web-site using a design environment such as Adobe 'Dreamweaver'. They use the graphics done by the graphic-artist, & along with their client produce an emerging look and navigational structure for the new web-site. An amateur web designer tends to start with the 'form' of a web site, instead of the function. Yet, to really produce an effective website, it's important to start with a clear understanding of what you need the site to really do. Is it principally an E-commerce website, that wants to have the ability to take payments safely and securely, or is it a web based product or service brochure listing? It's possible you'll want to highlight items via video & a heavily graphical inter-face, or maybe its predominantly an informational web site where the need is easy access to key text information (such as this particular web-site.) No matter what you want from a web site, it must - at its most basic level - fulfil the function for which it's intended. People will give up on a website and not go back if it's too tricky to navigate - however great it looks at first glance. The aim of any reputable web-designer is to first and foremost design an event that people enjoy & feel comfortable with - so they return again and again.

The one thing you need to realise is that no training course can make a web designer out of you. The program will only teach all the skills & techniques. As you complete your training course, make the effort to put together and develop a wide range of your own sites to produce a portfolio of your work. Produce web-sites about a hobby, your pet, your favourite band or TV show. Construct an inter-active web site, and begin generating traffic towards it. Anything you do will enhance your CV, and demonstrate much more to a company than an 'Adobe' certification.

Web-developers are members of the group, and also the most technically apt. Along with being proficient in HTML, 'XML' and 'CSS', web developers will know other 'proper' programming-languages such as Visual Basic, PHP, 'Java', 'C#' & 'ASP.Net' for instance. Many also have got a good understanding of SQL, the Database language - as the data on most sizable modern websites is stored in this particular language. Most e-commerce internet sites aren't actually the result of a big crew of web designers who have constructed 1000s of web pages in a lay-out format. Instead, a place-holder template will have been developed, & the contents will be dynamically loaded from a database. So as well as significantly greater efficiencies with the web site build, this process also provides for an infinitely more uniform look & feel as well.

Extra skill-sets that are very useful for commercial web designers are a knowledge of project-management and e-commerce. Search Engine Optimisation ('SEO') is another area which handles how a web-site is listed with search engines - to ensure that it may be easily found (this really is almost a whole job by itself.) And whilst they typically originate from a network-administration background, we should remember the valuable work of the web-server installers and administrators, who keep the whole thing working behind the scenes.

The design environments used by web site designers are their most valuable resources. 'Adobe Creative Suite' 4 is really the most commercially popular in the market these days (as of '10). Whilst Adobe Flash gives access to interactive and animated 'graphical' content, 'Dreamweaver' is the software program which builds web-sites. 'Dreamweaver' could be considered a glorified Word-Processor in a great many ways. In accordance with particular rules and constraints, it enables you to place text and graphics, and then via a process called page-linking you can generate basic inter-activity throughout the web site. Like other web design-environments, 'Dreamweaver' produces the program code HTML in the background (HTML is short for Hyper Text Markup Language). Effectively, this 'language of web-browsers is actually a 'script' which draws & controls the page being viewed. Layout 'tag' 'languages' like XML & CSS are associated with 'HTML'. As these tag languages are 'standardised', the streamlined and rather more efficient results perform effectively on a number of different platforms. The idea is that the page will appear exactly the same on any internet browser, be it Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari, 'Opera' or whatever. As a result the graphic blocks you are placing and the text you're putting in is being converted into coding in the background by 'Dreamweaver'. It is important to have a thorough comprehension of these types of languages if you would like be a web designer at the commercial standard.

Lots of independent web-designers can handle a number of these jobs by themselves; in actual fact we work with quite a few who can regularly. It will take time however to acquire such a variety of commercial abilities. You need to be taught a number of things on a professionally feasible web-design training program: First of all, an introduction to basic web design, followed by training in Adobe Dreamweaver & an understanding of the primary aspects of Adobe Flash. Next you must learn the coding languages HTML & CSS, & then be trained in an overview of how e-commerce operates. Some database & 'SEO' knowledge is important, & a knowledge of the programming language 'PHP' (as opposed to the more complicated ASP.Net) for you to construct dynamic web sites. All of this is just to reach a standard of competence technically where you're able to work on a broad enough array of sites. The actual physical skill-sets must be learned first of all, before you can fine tune them to a more natural and flowing style - similar to the time you were learning to drive a car. A thorough program of this sort would probably take close to four to five hundred hrs of part time study (& practice) & can therefore be successfully completed part-time over a year. An experienced advisor can assist you to prepare your path through this quagmire of commercial-learning, and we strongly recommend that you take the time to plan your track carefully before you start your web design training.