It's fair to state that perhaps one of the more broadly interpreted & improperly perceived terms in IT is the label 'Web Designer'. In truth, web-design does incorporate a lot of distinct aspects, & so it may well help to clarify things if we go through each one. You'll find there are essentially 2 sides to web-design - the technical side & the 'creative' 'design' part. To the average man or women in the street, a 'web designer' is somebody who creates the look & 'feel' of a website. Many of us will consider a 'web-designer' a type of artist. However, a modern 'web-designer' will in actual fact be as occupied with the 'technical' side of things as much as the creative side. If you break down web-design in to its various tasks, then it becomes more evident how each thing fits together.

First, there are graphic artists, who design and assemble the graphic icons and images that you see on any website. They are not strictly web designers per-se, & more often than not are multimedia artists using graphic layout & 'animation' software, (for instance Adobe Photoshop & Adobe Flash.) Generally, they will have an artistic background, and may have undertaken studies at university level. This part is much more about creative ability than any other function.

Web-designers come next - these people employ design-software like Dreamweaver to prepare & design the appearance & feel of the website. They use the visuals completed by the graphic artist, and along with their client create an initial look & 'navigational' structure for the new site. A novice web-designer tends to start with the 'form' of a web-site, rather than the 'function'. To be able to develop a good web-site however, it is crucial to first of all look at what you essentially want the web-site to do. This may be a web based catalogue of products and solutions, or possibly it is an e-commerce web site that needs to have the facility sell directly from the page. It's possible you need to highlight merchandise via video & a largely graphical inter-face, or perhaps its mainly an informational website where the requirement is straightforward access to essential text content (such as this web site.) Basically the site must have the ability to meet its requirements - whatever those particular needs are. Such a lot of websites look brilliant but are a nightmare to navigate & get what you want - and so visitors give up and never come back. The aim of any good web-designer is first and foremost to build an experience that visitors enjoy and feel happy with - so that they come back again & again.

The key tools utilised by web-site designers are their design-environments, with Adobe Creative Suite (currently in Version 4 as of 2009/2010) being essentially the most popular commercially. Dreamweaver is the software which builds website pages, with Flash delivering access to animated and interactive 'graphical' content. In many ways we can see 'Dreamweaver' as a glorified Word-Processor. Within certain rules and parameters, it lets you place text and graphics, and then through a procedure called 'page linking' you can generate basic inter-activity throughout the web-site. 'HTML' (Hyper Text Mark-up Language) program-coding is produced behind the scenes with Dreamweaver, as with any other web design-environment. 'HTML' is a script which in essence 'draws' & controls the page displayed on your monitor. Its the 'language' of web-browsers. Associated with HTML are the layout 'tag' 'languages' like XML & CSS. Because they are standardised, these tag languages can work on multiple-platforms to facilitate more stream-lined HTML coding and more efficient lay-out techniques. Therefore the page will look exactly the same on Microsoft 'Internet Explorer', 'Mozilla Firefox', 'Opera', Safari etc. (at least, that's the idea!) So even though you place the graphic-blocks and add the text, 'Dreamweaver' is turning this in to coding in the background. Its essential to achieve an in-depth understanding of these types of 'languages' to be able to be a website designer at a commercial level.

The most technically apt web experts are frequently the web-developers. In addition to being proficient in 'HTML', 'XML' & CSS, web developers will know other respected programming languages like 'VB', PHP, 'Java', C# & ASP.net for example. They will generally also have a strong understanding of SQL Database technology, because this is how most modern substantial sites store their information. A normal e-commerce website does not have a crew of web designers who've produced it's 1000s of web-pages in layout format. What typically occurs is a place holder 'template' is built, & the details are dynamically fed from a Database to the web-site. Besides being vastly more efficient to build, manage & up-date, it also aids in the 'feel' of the website being constant.

Naturally you will find cross overs with a lot of these tasks - we ourselves have connections with a number of web-designers who're capable in a lot of them. It will take time however to create such an array of commercial skillsets. The right professional web design training program therefore must teach a number of things: A synopsis of the basic fundamentals of web-design first of all, then directly into using Dreamweaver to a professional level & the main nuances of Flash too. The languages of 'HTML' and CSS should be covered next, with a certain amount of e-commerce teaching included here. To build 'dynamic' websites you'll need to learn 'PHP', which is a less arduous programming language to start off in than ASP.NET. In addition , you need a basic understanding of databases and SEO. The reason why you require these aspects is they will give you the technical wherewithal to operate on an array of website builds. The actual physical skill-sets have to be learned first of all, before you elevate them to a natural flowing style - just like the time you learned to drive a car. You'd need to allow somewhere around 400 to 500 hrs to study and competently master a wide-ranging program such as this - therefore if your plan is to achieve this along with a job it could be completed within twelve months. A skilled advisor can help you plan your path through this labyrinth of professional training, & we recommend that you plan your track carefully before you begin your web design training.

The most important thing to emphasise is that the training itself will not make you a web-designer; it will simply educate you on the techniques. As you get into your training course, make an effort to construct and develop a broad range of your own websites to produce a portfolio of your work. Your websites should be about anything you like - your local music-scene, horses, a writer you like or even performance cars. Start to build interactive sites and create 'traffic' to them. Adobe accreditations are of help, but showing how you can apply the knowledge says a lot more about you as a web-designer!

Commercial web designers can also improve their offering if they choose to branch-out in to areas like project management and E-commerce for example. Another area - which isn't to be under-estimated - is 'SEO' (Search Engine Optimisation). This concerns how to optimize web site listings on Search Engines like Google & 'Yahoo'. And even though they generally originate from a network administration background, we should remember the incredibly valuable role of the web-server administrators and installers, who keep everything working behind the scenes.