The definition of 'Web-Designer' is possibly one of the most over used & mis-interpreted titles within the I.T. industry. If you're seeking to get into the marketplace, an explanation of the distinctive aspects ought to help to make things clear. Web Design involves the 'technical' components of a website along with the creative aspects. Most people believe a 'web designer' is somebody that is in charge of the visible aspects of the website. Lots of people will consider a web-designer a kind of 'artist'. In fact every web designer's function is an inter-related mix of 'technical' expertise and design-creativity - and the two things are becoming very hard to split up. When you break down web-design into it's component roles, then it becomes much more obvious how each thing fits together.

People that design and construct the images and graphic-icons that go on a website are known as graphic-artists. They most frequently bring this about by using graphic lay-out & 'animation' software (like Adobe Flash & Photoshop), and are not strictly site designers per-se. Most have come from higher education, with typically a degree-level art background. Plainly, this work calls for a strong artistic bent.

Next we have the web designers, who produce the lay-out & overall feel of a web-site by utilising a design-environment like Dreamweaver. Through the use of artwork from the graphic-artist, they'll construct the 'navigational' composition of the web-site, working with the clients to make sure that the feel is right. A large number of amateur web-site designers place emphasis first of all on the format of the web site, rather than it's function. But, you must essentially begin with an understanding of the functions its required to do to develop a truly productive web site. Is it predominantly an E-commerce web-site, that needs to have the capacity to take payments safely and securely, or is it a web-based product brochure listing? It's possible you want to accentuate goods by means of video and a heavily graphical inter-face, or it could be it's mostly an 'informational' web-site where the necessity is easy access to essential text content (like this particular web-site.) Basically the web-site must be able to meet it's requirements - whatever those particular requirements are. Visitors will give up on a site & not return if it is too difficult to 'navigate' - however pretty it looks on the surface. The aim of any professional web designer is first and foremost to create an experience that visitors enjoy & feel comfortable with - so they come back again.

Many of these roles can and certainly do cross over obviously, we work with several free-lance website designers who each can handle the majority of the above roles. Then again that level of knowledge will take a little while to master. You have to be trained in several things on a commercially feasible web-design training program: A synopsis of the basic fundamentals of web-design first of all, then straight on to using Dreamweaver to a professional level & the primary nuances of 'Flash' too. The languages of 'HTML' and 'CSS' need to be taught next, with some e-commerce instruction incorporated here. PHP has to be taught so dynamic websites can be built (ASP.Net is much more involved, and 'PHP' is very simple to get into initially,) & a simple idea of Databases and SEO should be mastered. Learning these abilities will give you a chance to start working on a good cross-section of websites. As with anything, we have to learn how to actually do the physical skill-sets initially, & then build increased finesse as a result of experience & practice. A comprehensive program of this sort would possibly take about 400-500 hrs of part time study & practice & can therefore be reasonably completed part time over a year. As there are various areas to consider, its well worth finding the time to look carefully at any training programs you're interested in. Talk to a person with knowledge of the industry who can help you sort things out.

Its vital to appreciate that even the very best web design programs can only show you the methods & procedures - none of them can convert you into a bona fide web-designer. Put together as many web sites as you possibly can as you go through your course - the practice will be invaluable and you will have a portfolio to show just what you can do. Your own web-sites can be about anything you like - the local music-scene, horses, a writer you like or motorbikes. You might even create inter-active web sites and get 'traffic' on them. Everything you do will add to your CV, and demonstrate more to a recruiter than an Adobe certification.

The key resources utilised by web-site designers are their design environments, with 'Adobe Creative Suite' (currently in version 4 as of '09/10) being the most commercially popular. Dreamweaver is the software program that builds website pages, with Flash delivering access to animated and interactive 'graphical' content material. In a great many ways we could possibly see 'Dreamweaver' as a glorified Word Processor. It will let you lay graphics and text in accordance with certain rules and parameters, & then develop basic inter-activity via page-linking. As with other web design environments, Dreamweaver produces the program-code 'HTML' behind the scenes ('HTML' is short for 'Hyper Text Markup Language'). It's the language of web-browsers, and is a 'script' that basically 'draws' & controls the page you are looking at. Lay-out tag 'languages' like CSS and XML are paired with 'HTML'. As these tag languages are 'standardised', the smoother & rather more efficient outcomes function effectively on many different platforms. So no matter which internet browser somebody uses, ('Internet Explorer', Mozilla Firefox, 'Opera' etc.) the web-page will hopefully appear the same. So though you're laying graphic blocks and adding text, in the background, 'Dreamweaver' is turning what you're doing in to 'code'. If you are aiming to be a commercially viable web-designer, you will need an in-depth knowledge of these types of 'languages'.

Additional skill-sets that are important for professional web-site designers are a knowledge of project-management and e-commerce. 'SEO' (Search Engine Optimisation) know-how is extremely useful for web-experts - this deals with the art of getting sites to or near the top of the Search Engines for commonly used keyword phrases. And even though they generally come from a network-administration background, we should remember the valuable job of the web-server administrators & installers, who keep everything working behind the scenes.

Web developers are the most technically-trained of all. Not only will web-developers understand the languages mentioned above, they will also have mastered additional languages, for instance C#, 'VB', PHP, 'Java', 'ASP.Net' and so on. Many also have a very good understanding of 'SQL', the database language - because the information on most large modern sites is stored in this language. A typical e-commerce web-site does not have a bunch of web designers who have created it's many hundreds of web-pages in layout format. More often, following the construction of a place holder template, the contents will be extracted from a Database and 'dynamically' inserted. So along with much better efficiency with the web site build, using this method also provides for an infinitely more consistent look and feel as well.

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