It is reasonable to say that perhaps one of the more widely interpreted & poorly understood definitions in IT is the expression Web Designer. In actual fact, web design does incorporate a lot of different fields, and so it may help to simplify things when we break it down. Web-Design involves the technical components of a website along with the 'creative' aspects. The average PC user considers web-designers are responsible for how a site 'looks' and feels. To put it differently, they see web designers as 'artists' on the whole. But in actuality, in modern web design it is getting increasingly difficult to split up the technical part from the 'creative' side, because both are so inter-twined. It will become a bit more obvious how things sit together when we break the profession up in to it's different roles.

Graphic-artists are first - these people design & construct the icons & pictures for a web site. They most often make this happen by making use of graphic lay-out & 'animation' software (like Adobe 'Flash' & 'Photoshop'), and aren't really web designers per-se. Generally, they'll have come from an artistic background, and could have studied at college or university level. Obviously, this work demands a keen artistic bias.

Next there are the web designers, who produce the lay-out & overall 'feel' of a website by using a design environment like Adobe Dreamweaver. They utilise the graphics that are created by the graphic-artist, & work with their client to initially develop the 'feel' & 'navigational' framework of the website. A web designer with fairly limited knowledge may very well begin with the 'form' rather than the 'function' of a web-site. In order to create a good web site though, it is vital that you first look at what you really need the website to accomplish. Potentially it is actually a web based inventory, or an E-commerce site where products and solutions are available directly. It's possible you want to accentuate products by way of video and a heavily graphical interface, or it could be it's mainly an informational website where the need is simple access to essential text data (such as this particular web site.) Regardless of what you require from a site, it must - at it's most elementary level - carry out the function for which its intended. Consumers will leave a web-site and not come back if its too complicated to get around - however great it appears on the surface. The aim of any professional web-designer is first & foremost to come up with an experience that people enjoy and feel comfortable with - so they return again and again.

The most technically trained web professionals are often the web-developers. Together with a sound grasp of 'HTML', 'XML' and CSS, web-developers will know other highly regarded programming-languages like Visual Basic, PHP, Java, 'C#' & ASP.net for instance. Quite a few also have a good understanding of SQL, the Database language - as the information on many sizable modern websites is stored in this language. In reality, it's un-likely that a large e-commerce web-site has been built in lay-out format by a crew of web-designers. More usually, following the construction of a place holder 'template', the material will be extracted from a database and dynamically inserted. In addition to being massively more efficient to create, manage and update, it also aids in the feel of the web-site being consistent.

The most important tools used by web-designers are their design-environments, with 'Adobe Creative Suite' (now in version 4 as of 2009/2010) being essentially the most commercially popular. Dreamweaver is the software which builds website pages, with 'Flash' delivering access to interactive & animated graphical content material. In some ways we may look at 'Dreamweaver' as a rather fancy Word-Processor. It will let you lay graphics and text in accordance with specific rules & parameters, and then build basic inter-activity via page-linking. Dreamweaver (as with any web design environment) creates 'HTML' (Hyper-Text-Markup-Language) program-code in the background. 'HTML' is a script which in essence draws and controls the web page displayed on your screen. Its the 'language' of web-browsers. Alongside HTML are the lay-out tag languages - such as CSS and XML. These tag languages allow more stream-lined 'HTML' code & more effective layout methods, that will work on multiple-platforms (because they are 'standardised'). The concept being that the web page will look exactly the same on any browser, be it 'Mozilla Firefox', Internet Explorer, 'Safari', 'Opera' or whichever. Consequently though you're placing graphic blocks and adding text, behind the scenes, 'Dreamweaver' is turning what you're doing in to 'code'. A comprehensive understanding of these languages is vital if you're to become a commercially viable web-designer.

Further skills that are important to commercial web-site designers are a knowledge of project management & E-commerce. Another area - which is not to be underestimated - is SEO (Search Engine Optimisation). This concerns how to optimise web site listings on search engines like 'Google' and Yahoo. And whilst they generally come from a network administration background, we mustn't forget the incredibly valuable role of the web server installers & administrators, who keep everything working in the background.

Needless to say there are crossovers with a lot of these functions - we ourselves have interactions with several web-site designers who're skilled in many of them. Nevertheless, you will need time to develop that amount of expertise. An appropriate professional web design program then must teach a number of things: Firstly, an introduction to basic web-design, followed on by teaching in Adobe Dreamweaver and a summary of the key components of Adobe 'Flash'. This would then move onto a knowledge of HTML & 'CSS', with vital insights into the area of e-commerce. PHP must be taught to ensure that 'dynamic' sites can be constructed (ASP.Net is actually much more involved, and 'PHP' is very simple to get into at first,) and a basic idea of databases & 'SEO' should be achieved. Learning these abilities will provide you with a chance to begin working on a very good cross-section of web-sites. Much like anything else, we must learn how to actually do the physical skillsets initially, & then acquire more 'finesse' via experience and practice. You'd probably have to give yourself somewhere around four hundred to five hundred hours to study & properly master a wide ranging training program like this - therefore if your plan is to get this done alongside employment it could be done within a year. Careful planning to obtain the appropriate training program for you is a good investment in your future - skilled training experts will help you sort the best way forward before you decide to start.

The one thing it's essential to understand is no training course can actually make a web designer out of you. The actual program will merely cover all the techniques and skills. Throughout your training & study, it's essential to spend time building and developing as many web-sites as you can, to practice and assemble your portfolio. Create web sites about a special interest, your dog, your favourite band or even TV show. Build an inter-active site, & begin generating traffic towards it. Anything you do will enhance your CV, and illustrate more to an interviewer than an 'Adobe' accreditation.

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