It is fair to state that perhaps one of the most widely interpreted and poorly defined definitions in I.T. is the label 'Web Designer'. Website Design incorporates many distinctive aspects, and a good understanding of these may help anybody thinking of getting in the marketplace. You'll find there are essentially 2 elements to web design - the technical side & the 'creative' 'design' part. To the average person on the street, a web-designer is someone that designs the 'look' and 'feel' of a web-site. Many of us will consider a web designer a form of 'artist'. But in actuality, within modern web design its becoming more and more difficult to separate the technical part from the creative element, because both of them are so inter-twined. If you break down web design in to it's component functions, then it becomes much more evident how each thing fits together.

First, we've got the graphic-artists, who design and put together the graphic icons & pictures which we see on any web-site. In real terms, graphic artists are generally not really web-designers. More often they're multimedia artists who employ software like Adobe Photoshop and Flash to generate their finished results. Normally, they'll have come from an art background, & may possibly have studied at university or college level. This particular part is much more about a creative artistic ability than anything else.

Then there are the web designers, who generate the lay-out & overall feel of a web-site by using a design environment such as Adobe 'Dreamweaver'. By using visuals from the artist, they will create the 'navigational' composition of the website, keeping in touch with the clients to make sure that the 'feel' is right. A web designer with limited understanding may very well start with the form instead of the function of a web-site. But, you must actually start with a grasp of the 'functions' its required to perform to develop a really successful web site. Perhaps it's in effect a web-based catalogue, or an e-commerce website where items are offered directly. It's possible you'll want to show merchandise through video & a heavily 'graphical' inter-face, or perhaps its largely an informational web-site where the need is straightforward access to key text content (such as this web-site.) Fundamentally the site must have the facility to meet its needs - whatever those particular requirements are. People will give up on a web-site and not return if its too tricky to get around - however pretty it looks at first glance. The over-riding purpose of every professional web site designers is for people to pay a visit to their web-site regularly - so it really needs to be a comfortable & fulfilling experience.

The one thing you need to understand is that no training course can make a web designer out of you. The actual program will simply teach all the techniques & skills. As you complete your training course, make the effort to create & develop a broad range of your own web sites to create a portfolio of your work. Your sites should be about anything you like - your local music-scene, horses, an author you admire or even performance cars. You might even create interactive websites and get 'traffic' on them. Adobe certifications are of help, but how you can implement the knowledge says far more about you as a web-designer!

Web-developers are members of the equation, and also the most technically trained. They won't only know 'HTML', 'CSS' & 'XML', but will have also learnt 'proper' programming-languages such as PHP, ASP.net, VB, 'C#', 'Java' among others. Quite a few also have got an effective understanding of 'SQL', the database language - because the information on most sizable modern websites is stored in this particular 'language'. In reality, it is un-likely that a big e-commerce site has been put together in lay-out format by a crew of web designers. What normally occurs is a place-holder template is produced, and the contents are automatically fed from a Database to the web-site. Besides being vastly more efficient to create, manage and update, it also aids in the 'feel' of the web-site staying constant.

Additional skillsets which are important for professional web designers are a knowledge of project management and e-commerce. Another discipline - that is not to be underestimated - is SEO (Search Engine Optimisation). This is focused on how to optimise web-site listings on search engines like Google and 'Yahoo'. And whilst they typically come from a network administration background, we mustn't forget the incredibly valuable role of the web-server administrators and installers, who keep the whole thing working in the background.

The design environments used by web-site designers are their key tools. 'Adobe Creative Suite' 4 is really the most commercially utilised in the industry nowadays (as of 2010). Whilst 'Adobe Flash' gives access to animated & interactive 'graphical' content, Dreamweaver is the software program that builds sites. Dreamweaver may be looked at as a 'glorified' Word-Processor in a great many ways. Within certain rules and constraints, it allows you to display text & graphics, & then via a procedure known as 'page linking' you can produce basic interactivity throughout the web site. Dreamweaver (as with any web-design environment) produces HTML (Hyper-Text-Markup-Language) program-code in the background. It's the language of web-browsers, and is a script which essentially draws and controls the page you are seeing. Lay-out tag 'languages' like CSS and XML are matched up with HTML. As they are 'standardised', these will work on multiple platforms to enable more streamlined 'HTML' code and more efficient lay-out techniques. And so which-ever internet browser somebody uses, ('Internet Explorer', Mozilla Firefox, Opera or anything else.) the page will ideally look the same. Subsequently the graphic-blocks you are placing & the text you are putting in is being converted into code in the background by Dreamweaver. It's extremely important to achieve a thorough knowledge of these various languages to be able to be a web-designer at a commercial level.

Several of these jobs can and do cross over obviously, we are involved with various independent website designers who all can handle a lot of the above functions. You will need time though to create such an array of commercial competencies. An ideal commercial web design training-program therefore should instruct on several things: A briefing of the basics of web design first of all, then straight into using 'Dreamweaver' to a commercial level and the key technicalities of 'Flash' as well. The languages of 'HTML' and CSS should be taught next, with a level of e-commerce training built-in here. To build 'dynamic' sites it's important to learn PHP, which is a less arduous programming-language to get into than ASP.Net. In addition , you need a basic grasp of databases & SEO. Accomplishing these abilities will provide you with a chance to begin working on a very good cross section of web-sites. As with anything, we must learn how to really do the physical skills first, & then establish greater finesse via experience and practice. You would have to allow approximately 400 to 500 hrs to study & effectively learn a broad-ranging program like this - so if your plan is to accomplish this along with a job it could be carried out within a year. A skilled advisor can help you plan your way through this quagmire of commercial learning, and we strongly recommend that you plan your path with care before you begin your training.

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