The definition of 'Web-Designer' is possibly one of the most over-used and misinterpreted labels within the I.T. industry. In truth, web-design does consist of many diverse aspects, & so it may help to explain things if we go through each one. You'll find there are essentially 2 elements to web design - the 'technical' side & the creative 'design' side. To the average person on the street, a 'web designer' is somebody that designs the 'look' and 'feel' of a website. Which means a web-designer is essentially an artist who has had some 'technical' training. In fact the present day web designer's job is an 'inter-related' blend of 'technical' knowledge & design creativity - & the two have become quite difficult to split up. It becomes a little more obvious how things sit together when we split the job down in to it's component roles.

Firstly, we have graphic artists, who design & assemble the graphic symbols & pictures which you find on a web-site. Most often they bring this about by means of graphic lay-out & 'animation' software (like Adobe 'Flash' and 'Photoshop'), & aren't strictly web-designers per-se. The majority have been through higher education, typically with a degree level art qualification. Obviously, this role demands a good artistic bent.

Then come the web designers, who generate the lay-out & overall 'feel' of a web site by using a design-environment like Dreamweaver. They take on the graphics completed by the graphic-artist, and alongside their client develop an initial style & navigational framework for the brand-new site. An amateur web-designer tends to start with the form of a web-site, instead of the function. And yet, to actually build a valuable site, you should begin with a clear understanding of the things you need the website to actually do. It could be an online inventory of items, or maybe it is an e-commerce web-site which wants to have the facility sell directly from the web page. Or maybe it'll contain lots of video & heavy graphics. Then again it could be principally an information site, where its important to offer easy entry to appropriate web pages of text. No matter what you want from a website, it must - at it's most basic level - fulfil the 'function' for which its designed. Such a lot of websites look wonderful but they are a nightmare to navigate and get what you need - & so people leave and never come back. The overriding aim of every good site designers is to have people go to their web-site repeatedly - therefore it really needs to be a comfortable and pleasurable experience.

Supplemental skillsets which are very useful to professional web designers are a knowledge of project management and e-commerce. SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) expertise is extremely useful for web-experts - this concerns the skill of getting sites to or near to the top of the Search Engines like Google for commonly used keyword phrases. And in the background but very crucially we have the web server installers & administrators who ensure that the whole thing runs smoothly. Technically speaking these people are network-administrator professionals though.

Web-developers are members of the equation, and the most technically apt. These people won't just understand HTML, 'CSS' & XML, but will have learnt more official programming languages such as 'PHP', ASP.Net, 'VB', 'C#', 'Java' etc. They will generally also have got a solid knowledge of 'SQL' Database technology, as this is how most modern significant web sites store their data. An average E-commerce web-site doesn't have a bunch of web designers who have created its 1000s of web-pages in lay-out format. Instead, a place holder 'template' will have been created, and the material will be 'dynamically' inserted from a database. This process makes not only the building, management & updates vastly more straighforward, it equally produces a far more consistent site.

It's essential to realise that even the best web design programs can only teach you the techniques & procedures - none of them can actually convert you in to a professional web designer. Put together as many web-sites as you possibly can as you work through your studies - the exercise will be invaluable and you will have something to show what you can do. A hobby or other interest can be a good starting point, or simply your favourite dog, or a holiday resort you particularly loved. Build an inter-active website, & begin building traffic towards it. All this will look much more constructive on your Curriculum Vitae, and in your portfolio, than a document from 'Adobe' will!

Naturally you will find cross-overs with a lot of these jobs - we ourselves have interactions with several web designers who are skilled in most of them. It will require time though to acquire such a selection of professional skills. A web design program then that will prepare you to enter the workplace must consist of the following - A basic introduction to web design, followed by how to use Adobe Dreamweaver and have a fundamental understanding of Adobe Flash. The languages of HTML & 'CSS' need to be taught next, with a certain amount of E-commerce training included here. To construct dynamic web sites you'll need to learn 'PHP', which is an easier programming-language to get into than ASP.NET. You additionally need a basic knowledge of Databases and SEO. The main reason you require each of these elements is so that you have the technical ability to be effective on a variety of web-site builds. The actual physical skills must come first of all, before you fine tune them to a more natural and flowing style - much like when you learned to drive a car. You would have to allow about 400 to 500 hours to study and competently grasp a broad-ranging program like this - therefore if your aim is to accomplish this alongside a job it could be carried out within twelve months. Detailed planning to obtain the correct training package for your needs is a good investment in your future - experienced career experts can help you sort the best way forward before you decide to get going.

The key tools used by web-designers are their design environments, with 'Adobe Creative Suite' (now in version 4 as of '09/10) staying essentially the most popular commercially. 'Dreamweaver' is the software which builds website pages, with Flash providing usage of animated & interactive graphical content. 'Dreamweaver' might be considered a 'glorified' Word Processor in a great many ways. It lets you lay text and graphics according to specific parameters and rules, & then develop basic interactivity through page-linking. Like other web design environments, Dreamweaver creates the program code HTML behind the scenes ('HTML' is short for Hyper Text Markup Language). In essence, this 'language of web-browsers is a 'script' which 'draws' & controls the page being looked at. Lay-out 'tag' 'languages' like CSS & XML are associated with 'HTML'. Because these 'tag' languages are standardised, the streamlined and more efficient results perform successfully on a number of different platforms. Therefore the web-page will look the same on Microsoft Internet Explorer, 'Mozilla Firefox', Opera, Safari etc. (or shall we say, that's the idea!) So although you place the graphic-blocks & put in the textual content, Dreamweaver is turning this in to code in the background. A comprehensive understanding of these various 'languages' is essential if you are to become a commercially-viable website designer.

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