Its reasonable to say that perhaps one of the more broadly interpreted & poorly perceived terms within IT is the label Web Designer. In truth, web-design does include several diverse aspects, and so it might help to simplify things if we break it down. You'll find there are essentially 2 elements to web-design - the technical process and the 'creative' 'design' part. The typical computer user believes web-designers are responsible for how a web-site 'looks' and feels. Many individuals will consider a web designer a type of artist. Yet, a modern 'web designer' will in actual fact be as occupied with the 'technical' element of things as they are with the creative side. It will become much more evident how things fit together if we split the profession up into its various roles.

Graphic-artists come 1st - they design & build the icons & pictures for a web page. Most often they make this happen by means of graphic layout and animation software (such as Adobe Flash and Photoshop), & are generally not actually web-designers as such. The majority have been through further education, with typically a degree level art qualification. Most importantly, this work requires a good creative skill.

Web designers are second - these people utilise design software such as Dreamweaver to prepare and design the appearance & feel of the site. Using artwork from the artist, they'll build the 'navigational' composition of the web-site, working with the clients to ensure the feel is correct. A lot of inexperienced site designers focus to start with on the format of the web site, rather than it's 'function'. But, to truly create an effective website, you should start with a clear understanding of what you need the web-site to really do. Perhaps it is basically a web based inventory, or an e-commerce site where products and services can be bought directly. Or maybe it will consist of a lot of video and graphics. Then again it might be principally an informational site, where its important to provide easy access to specific web pages of textual content. Whatever you require from a site, it must - at it's most basic level - carry out the function for which it is intended. A lot of web-sites look brilliant but are a pain to get around & get where you want - and so users give up and never come back. The overriding purpose of all professional site designers is to have people visit their website on a regular basis - so it really needs to be a pleasant & enjoyable experience.

It's vital to realise that even the finest web-design programs can only show you the techniques and procedures - none of them can actually turn you in to a professional web-designer. As you get into your training-course, make the effort to put together & develop a broad selection of your own web-sites to produce a profile of your work. Your sites can be about anything - the local music-scene, farm pets, an author you enjoy or performance cars. You could even build interactive sites and get 'traffic' on them. All this will seem much more favourable on your Curriculum Vitae, and in your Portfolio, than a document from 'Adobe' will!

Of course there are crossovers with many of these jobs - in-fact we have interactions with several web-site designers who are capable in a lot of them. Although that degree of understanding takes a while to master. You'll need to be trained in a number of things on a commercially feasible web design training program: A basic introductory tutorial to web-design, followed by how to use Adobe Dreamweaver & gain a fundamental understanding of Adobe 'Flash'. This would then lead on to a knowledge of 'HTML' & 'CSS', with some coaching within the field of E-commerce. To build 'dynamic' websites it's important to have a grasp of PHP, which is a less arduous programming language to start off in than ASP.Net. You additionally need a basic grasp of Databases and SEO. The reason why you need all these components is so that you have the technical grounding to work on an array of web-site builds. The physical skill-sets must come first of all, before you fine-tune them to a natural flowing style - much like when you were learning to drive your first car. You'd probably need to give yourself something like 400-500 hrs to study & properly master a wide-ranging training-program like this - so if your aim is to do this along-side full-time work it could be done within one year. A skilled advisor can assist you to prepare the right path through this labyrinth of commercial learning, and we strongly suggest that you take the time to plan your path with care before you begin your web design training.

The Adobe Creative Suite is the most commercially-popular design environment utilised by web-designers today. These essential tools are now (2010) on Version 4. Whilst Adobe Flash provides access to interactive & animated 'graphical' content, 'Dreamweaver' is the software program which builds web pages. 'Dreamweaver' might be looked at as a glorified Word-Processor in many ways. It will let you lay graphics and text according to particular rules and parameters, & then produce basic interactivity through page linking. Dreamweaver (or any other web design environment) produces HTML ('Hyper Text Markup Language') program-code in the background. In essence, this 'language of web-browsers is actually a script which 'draws' & controls the web-page being looked at. Along with 'HTML' are the layout tag languages - for instance XML and CSS. These tag languages allow more stream-lined HTML code and more effective lay-out techniques, that will work on multiple platforms (as they're standardised). And so which-ever internet browser someone uses, ('Internet Explorer', Mozilla Firefox, 'Opera' and so on.) the page will ideally appear exactly the same. As a result the graphic-blocks you are placing and the text you are including is being turned into coding in the background by Dreamweaver. Its essential to gain an in-depth knowledge of these various languages to be able to be a web designer at the commercial level.

Additional skills which are very useful for professional web-designers are an understanding of project-management & e-commerce. Search Engine Optimisation ('SEO') is another discipline which tackles how the web site is listed with search engines - so that it can be found more easily (this really is almost an entire job in itself.) And whilst they technically originate from a network administration background, we should remember the valuable function of the web-server installers & administrators, who keep everything working behind the scenes.

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