The definition of 'Web Designer' is possibly one of the more over-used and mis-understood labels in the IT sector. In truth, web-design does include a variety of distinctive fields, & so it might help to simplify things when we break it down. Web Design involves the 'technical' components of a website and also the 'creative' elements. The typical computer user believes web-designers are responsible for how a web-site 'looks' & 'feels'. Which means a web designer is essentially an artist with some technical training. But in actuality, in modern web design it's turning out to be more and more difficult to split up the technical side from the creative element, because both are so inter-twined. When you break web design down in to its component functions, then it becomes much more obvious how each thing sits together.

People that design and build the pictures and graphic-icons which go on a web page are called graphic artists. Most often they make this happen by means of graphic layout & animation software (such as Adobe Flash & 'Photoshop'), and are generally not actually web designers as such. Frequently, they will have an artistic background, and may possibly have undertaken studies at university level. This area is a lot more about artistic ability than any other function.

Web-site designers are next - they use design software such as Adobe 'Dreamweaver' to create & design the 'look' & 'feel' of the site. By employing visuals from the artist, they'll build the navigational composition of the website, working together with their clients to make sure that the feel is correct. A large number of inexperienced site designers put emphasis to begin with on the 'format' of the web-site, rather than its function. If you want to create an efficient web-site though, it is vital that you first of all look at what you actually need the site to do. Is it primarily an E-commerce web site, which wants to be able to take payments securely, or is it an online product or service catalogue listing? It's possible you need to highlight merchandise by means of video & a largely graphical inter-face, or perhaps it is predominantly an 'informational' web-site where the necessity is simple access to key text data (such as this particular web-site.) In essence the web-site must have the facility to meet it's required needs - whatever those particular requirements are. There's little point making a visually impressive site that's too hard for anyone to navigate! The overriding aim of all good site designers is for people to see their website on a regular basis - so it needs to be a pleasant & satisfying experience.

The thing you must grasp is no training course can in fact make a web designer out of you. The actual course will simply cover all the skills and techniques. As you get into your training course, take some time to create and develop a good range of your own websites to produce a portfolio of your work. Your web-sites should be about anything - the local music-scene, horses, an author you enjoy or motor bikes. Start to build interactive web-sites and generate 'traffic' on to them. Anything you do will enhance your Curriculum Vitae, and indicate more to an employer than just an Adobe certificate.

The key tools used by web-designers are the design-environments, with Adobe Creative Suite (presently in version 4 as of '09/10) staying the most popular commercially. Dreamweaver is the software program which builds websites, with 'Flash' providing usage of animated & interactive 'graphical' content material. In a great many ways we may look at 'Dreamweaver' as a glorified Word Processor. In accordance with specific rules and parameters, it allows you to display graphics & text, and then via a method known as 'page linking' you can create basic interactivity throughout the website. Like other web design-environments, 'Dreamweaver' produces the program code HTML behind the scenes (HTML stands for Hyper Text Markup Language). This is the 'language' of web-browsers, & is a script which essentially draws and controls the web-page you are looking at. Layout 'tag' languages like CSS and XML are associated with HTML. As these tag languages are 'standardised', the smoother and more efficient results function successfully on many different platforms. The concept is that the web page will appear identical on any internet browser, whether it is 'Mozilla Firefox', Internet Explorer, 'Safari', 'Opera' or anything else. Consequently although you're laying graphic-blocks & text, behind the scenes, 'Dreamweaver' is converting this in to code. Its essential to gain an in-depth understanding of these languages if you wish to be a website designer at the commercial level.

Further skillsets that are very useful to professional web designers are a knowledge of project management & E-commerce. 'Search Engine Optimisation' ('SEO') is another field that tackles how a website is indexed with search engines like google - so that it can be easily found (this really is almost a whole job by itself.) And of course, we mustn't overlook the web-server installers and administrators who work in the background ensuring the whole thing functions as it should; though they normally originate from a network administration background.

Many of these tasks can and do crossover of course, we are involved with a number of freelance web-designers who all can handle the majority of the previously mentioned tasks. It will take time however to create such an array of commercial skillsets. An ideal commercial web-design program then should instruct on several things: A briefing of the basic fundamentals of web design first of all, then straight on to using 'Dreamweaver' to a commercial standard and the primary nuances of Flash as well. Next you must learn the coding languages 'HTML' and CSS, & then be taught a synopsis of just how E-commerce works. Some database and SEO know-how is crucial, and an understanding of the programming language 'PHP' (instead of the more complex ASP.Net) for you to construct dynamic web-sites. The reason you require all these components is so that you have the technical ability to work on a range of web-site builds. The physical skill-sets must develop first of all, before you elevate them to a more natural flowing style - similar to the time you learned to drive your first car. You'd have to give yourself something like 400-500 hours to study and competently grasp a wide-ranging program of this nature - therefore if your plan is to achieve this along with a job it could be done within 1 year. Careful preparation to get the correct training program for you is a great investment in your future - experienced career advisors will help you to sort the best way forward before you start.

The most technically-trained web professionals are generally the web-developers. Not only will web developers understand the languages already mentioned, they will also have studied additional languages, for instance C#, VB, PHP, 'Java', ASP.Net etc. And because most modern web sites of any size store their data using SQL database-technology, they're also likely to have got a solid handle SQL too. The majority of E-commerce internet sites aren't actually the result of a big bunch of web designers who've constructed 1000s of web pages in lay-out form. What normally happens is a place holder template is produced, and the contents are automatically fed from a Database to the site. This makes not only the construction, management and upgrades massively more straighforward, it also makes for a more consistent site.

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