No doubt one of the most mis-understood & over-worked expressions in the I.T. market today must be the term Web Designer? Website Design incorporates a number of different facets, & an understanding of these facets could help anyone thinking of getting in to the market. Web-Design incorporates the technical elements of a successful website in addition to the creative aspects. The average computer user considers web-designers are responsible for how a site looks & feels. Meaning a web-designer is fundamentally an artist who has had some 'technical' training. But in reality, in modern-day web design it is getting more and more difficult to split up the technical side from the 'creative' side, because both of them are so inter-twined. If you break down web design in to it's component roles, then it becomes much more evident how everything fits together.

People that design and construct the images and graphic icons that go on a web-site are referred to as graphic artists. In real terms, graphic-artists aren't really web site designers. More often they're multi-media artists who employ software such as Adobe 'Photoshop' and 'Flash' to bring about their results. Many attended further education, with typically a degree-level art qualification. More than anything else, this work demands a strong creative ability.

Second of all, we have the web designers, that work with design-environments like Adobe Dreamweaver to create the layout & 'feel' of the site. They work with the visuals that are produced by the graphic-artist, and talk with their client to firstly create the 'feel' and navigational structure of the web-site. A web designer with fairly limited knowledge would probably begin with the 'form' instead of the function of a web site. However, to truly produce a valuable site, you should start with an understanding of what you require the web site to really do. It could be it is basically an online catalogue, or an E-commerce website where goods can be purchased there and then. Maybe you need to show off products through video and a heavily 'graphical' inter-face, or maybe its largely an informational site where the requirement is easy access to key text information (such as this particular web-site.) Basically the website must have the capacity to meet it's requirements - whatever those requirements are. Visitors will leave a website and not go back if it's too complicated to navigate - however pretty it appears on the surface. The purpose of any good web-designer is first and foremost to design an experience that people enjoy & are comfortable with - so they return again & again.

The thing you have to realise is no training-course can in fact make a web-designer out of you. The training course will merely teach all the skills and techniques. During your training & study, you have got to spend time building and developing as many websites as possible, to prepare and build your portfolio. Your own sites can be about anything - your local music-scene, horses, an author you admire or even motor bikes. Construct an interactive web site, & start generating traffic towards it. Adobe accreditations are of help, but how you can use the knowledge says a lot more about you as a web-designer!

Many free-lance web-site designers can handle several of these roles by themselves; indeed we work with a number who can regularly. Although that level of knowledge will take some time to master. A web-design training course then that will prepare you to enter the market must encompass the following disciplines - A briefing of the basic fundamentals of web-design first of all, then directly into using 'Dreamweaver' to a professional level and the main nuances of 'Flash' as well. Next you need to understand the 'coding' languages HTML and CSS, and then be trained in a synopsis of how e-commerce operates. PHP should be mastered to ensure that 'dynamic' web sites can be built (ASP.Net is much more involved, & 'PHP' is very simple to get into at first,) & a basic understanding of Databases and SEO should be achieved. The reason you need each of these aspects is so that you have the technical grounding to operate on a variety of web-site builds. As with anything, we have to learn how to do the physical skill-sets first, and then acquire increased finesse as a result of experience and practice. A comprehensive program of this sort would probably involve about four to five hundred hrs of part time study and practice & can therefore be reasonably concluded part time over 12 months. As there are lots of areas to consider, its well worth taking the time to look closely at any training-programs you're interested in. Talk to somebody with industry knowledge who can help you put things together.

Web-developers are the most technically apt of all. They will not just understand HTML, 'CSS' and 'XML', but will have learnt more official programming languages like PHP, ASP.Net, VB, 'C#', Java and the like. Quite a few also have a very good understanding of SQL, the database-language - since the information on most sizable modern websites is stored in this particular 'language'. The majority of E-commerce web sites aren't actually the result of a large group of web designers who have created countless web pages in a lay-out format. What usually occurs is a place-holder template is developed, & the details are dynamically fed from a database to the website. This process makes not only the building, management & enhancements massively more efficient, it also makes for a more consistent web site.

The 'Adobe Creative Suite' is regarded as the most commercially popular design-environment employed by web designers nowadays. These key applications are now ('10) on Version 4. The software which builds websites is 'Adobe Dreamweaver', & Adobe Flash accesses graphical content that can be animated and interactive. In some ways we can view 'Dreamweaver' as a glorified Word Processor. Graphics & text can be displayed (according to certain parameters) & then a basic interactivity can be established by page-linking. Dreamweaver (as with any web design environment) produces HTML (HyperText Markup Language) program-code behind the scenes. 'HTML' is a 'script' which basically 'draws' and controls the web-page displayed on your screen. It's the language of web-browsers. Lay-out tag languages like CSS & XML are associated with HTML. These enable more stream-lined 'HTML' coding and more efficient lay-out techniques, that will work on multiple-platforms (as they're standardised). The idea being that the web-page will appear identical on any internet 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 code behind the scenes. It's very important to have an in depth comprehension of these types of 'languages' if you wish to be a web designer at the commercial standard.

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