It's fair to say that one of the most broadly interpreted & badly understood terms in IT is the expression Web-Designer. Web Design includes lots of different facets, and an understanding of these can help anybody considering getting in to the marketplace. There are fundamentally two elements to web-design - the 'technical' side & the 'creative' 'design' part. The typical PC user thinks web designers determine how a site looks & 'feels'. Which means a 'web designer' is fundamentally an artist with some 'technical' instruction. In spite of this, a modern 'web-designer' will actually be as involved with the 'technical' side of things as much as the 'creative' side. If you break down web-design into its various roles, then it becomes much more apparent how everything fits together.

First, there are graphic artists, who design & build the graphic symbols & pictures which you find on any website. These are not strictly web-site designers per-se, & usually are multimedia artists making use of graphic layout & animation software, (like Adobe Photoshop & Adobe 'Flash'.) Typically, they will have an art background, and might have undertaken studies at university or college level. This particular element is more about artistic expertise than any other function.

Then come the web designers, who generate the lay-out and overall feel of a website by using a design-environment such as Adobe Dreamweaver. They utilise the graphics which are created by the graphic-artist, & work with their clients to start to create the feel and 'navigational' structure of the website. A novice web-designer often starts with the form of a web site, rather than the 'function'. To develop an effective website though, it is important to first of all look at what you actually want the web-site to accomplish. It's possible its essentially an online brochure, or an e-commerce website where merchandise can be bought directly. Maybe much like this site the key purpose is simple access to relevant details, or perhaps it'll be a showcase for merchandise via video & a heavily 'graphical' interface. No matter what you need from a site, it must - at its simplest level - fulfil the function for which it's designed. People will give up on a site and not come back if its too difficult to 'navigate' - however attractive it appears on the surface. The overriding aim of every professional web-site designers is to have people see their web-site on a regular basis - therefore it needs to be a happy and fulfilling experience.

The design-environments utilised by web site designers are their key tools. Adobe Creative Suite 4 is really the most commercially utilised in the industry right now (as of 2010). The software which builds web-sites is Adobe Dreamweaver, & Adobe Flash gives access to 'graphical' content material which can be interactive and animated. Dreamweaver may be looked at as a glorified Word-Processor in many ways. In accordance with particular rules and constraints, it lets you place text and graphics, & then through a procedure called page-linking you can develop basic interactivity inside the website. Just like other web design-environments, 'Dreamweaver' creates the program-code HTML behind the scenes (HTML stands for Hyper Text Markup Language). This is the language of web browsers, & is a script which basically 'draws' and controls the web-page you're viewing. Matched with 'HTML' are the lay-out 'tag' languages like CSS and XML. As these tag languages are 'standardised', the streamlined and rather more efficient results work effectively on many different platforms. The concept is that the web page will appear exactly the same on any web browser, whether it is Mozilla Firefox, 'Internet Explorer', 'Safari', 'Opera' or whichever. Subsequently the graphic-blocks you are placing & the text you're including is being converted into code behind the scenes by Dreamweaver. Its vitally important to achieve a thorough comprehension of these languages if you wish to be a web-designer at the commercial standard.

Of course you'll find crossovers with many of these tasks - we ourselves have contacts with several web-site designers who are skilled in many of them. But, it takes quite some time to develop that amount of knowledge. An ideal professional web design training program therefore needs to instruct on a number of things: A basic introduction to web-design, followed by how to utilise Adobe Dreamweaver and gain a basic knowledge of Adobe 'Flash'. Next you need to get to grips with the coding languages HTML and CSS, & after that be taught a synopsis of just how e-commerce operates. PHP should be mastered in order that 'dynamic' web sites can be built (ASP.NET is far more involved, & PHP is easier to get into initially,) and a basic understanding of databases & SEO should be mastered. The reason you'll need each of these components is so that you have the technical ability to be effective on a range of web site builds. Much like taking driving lessons, you must first develop the actual physical abilities, before you in essence push past them and accomplish a degree of finesse. An all-encompassing training-program of this sort would possibly require close to four to five hundred hours of part-time study (& practice) & therefore can be reasonably finished part time over 12 months. Careful preparation to get the correct training package for your needs is a great investment of your time - experienced training advisors will help you to sort the best way forward before you get started.

Alternative skills which are highly relevant to web designers in the professional market are a good grasp of E-commerce and project management. 'Search Engine Optimisation' ('SEO') is another discipline that handles how a site is listed with Search Engines - so it can be found more easily (this is sometimes a whole job in itself.) And behind the scenes but hugely important are the web server installers & administrators who make sure that the whole thing runs as it should. Technically speaking these people are network administrator specialists though.

Web-developers are members of this group, and they are the most technically-trained. Along with an understanding of 'HTML', XML & CSS, web-developers will know other respected programming languages such as 'VB', PHP, 'Java', C# & ASP.net etc. And because most contemporary web-sites of any size store their data using 'SQL' database-technology, they are likely to have got a solid grip SQL as well. In reality, its not likely that a big E-commerce site has been built in layout form by a crew of web-site designers. Rather, a place-holder 'template' will have been developed, & the contents will be dynamically inserted from a database. This process not only makes the construction, management & up-dates massively more straighforward, it also tends to make a more consistent web-site.