No doubt one of the most mis-interpreted & over-worked labels in the IT market today has to be the term Web-Designer? Web Design incorporates lots of distinctive aspects, & an understanding of these facets could help anybody wanting to get in the market. Web-Design involves the technical elements of a website and also the 'creative' elements. Most people assume a web designer is somebody who is responsible for the visible aspects of the website. Which means a 'web designer' is essentially an 'artist' with some 'technical' instruction. Yet, a professional web-designer will really be as occupied with the 'technical' element of things as they are with the creative side. We can demonstrate this with greater clarity when we separate web-design down in to it's various parts.

Firstly, we've got the graphic artists, that design & build the graphic icons & images which you find on a web page. In real terms, graphic artists are generally not really site designers. More usually they're multimedia artists that employ software such as Adobe 'Photoshop' & Flash to produce their results. The majority of graphic artists went to college or university, and have a background in art & design. Plainly, this particular job calls for a solid artistic flair.

Next we have the web-designers, who generate the lay-out & overall 'feel' of a web site using a design-environment such as Dreamweaver. They employ the actual graphics which are provided by the artist, and talk with the client to firstly develop the feel and 'navigational' composition of the web site. An amateur web designer tends to start with the form of the site, instead of the function. To be able to develop a successful web-site though, it is crucial that you first of all look at what you essentially would like the web-site to accomplish. Is it predominantly an E-commerce web-site, which wants to be ready to receive payments safely and securely, or is it an online product or service catalogue listing? Maybe much like this web-site the main purpose is simple access to pertinent details, or perhaps it'll be a showcase for products by means of video and a heavily 'graphical' interface. No matter what the purchaser needs from a web-site, the essential prerequisite is that it actually addresses the basic needs. People will abandon a site and not come back if it's too difficult to navigate - however pretty it looks at first glance. The goal of any professional web designer is to first & foremost create an event that visitors enjoy & feel happy with - so that they come back again and again.

The key thing to stress is that the training program alone won't make you a web designer; it will simply coach you on the techniques. Throughout your training and study, you have to spend time building & developing as many web sites as you possibly can, to practice & assemble your portfolio. Your websites can be about anything - your local music-scene, horses, an author you like or performance cars. Start to build inter-active web-sites and create traffic to them. This will all seem more constructive on your Curriculum Vitae, and in your Portfolio, than a certificate from Adobe will!

The most important resources used by web site designers are the design-environments, with Adobe Creative Suite (presently in version 4 as of 2009/2010) staying essentially the most commercially popular. Dreamweaver is the software program that builds website pages, with Flash providing access to interactive and animated 'graphical' content. You might say that Dreamweaver is the Word-Processor of the Adobe CS series. It lets you lay text & graphics according to specific rules and parameters, and then create basic inter-activity through page-linking. 'Dreamweaver' (as with any web-design environment) creates 'HTML' ('Hyper Text Markup Language') program code behind the scenes. It's the 'language' of web-browsers, and is a script that effectively 'draws' & controls the web-page you're viewing. Associated with HTML are the layout 'tag' languages like XML & CSS. As these tag 'languages' are standardised, the streamlined & rather more efficient results work effectively on a number of different platforms. The theory is that the web page will appear the same on any browser, whether it's 'Mozilla Firefox', 'Internet Explorer', Safari, 'Opera' or whichever. Consequently the graphic blocks you're laying and the text you are adding is being converted into 'code' in the background by 'Dreamweaver'. If you are going to be a commercially feasible website designer, you will have to have a thorough understanding of these languages.

Other skills that are relevant to web-designers in the commercial marketplace are a good grasp of E-commerce & project-management. Another discipline - that is not to be under-estimated - is SEO (Search Engine Optimisation). This is all about how to optimize web-site listings on Search Engines like Google and 'Yahoo'. And behind the scenes but vitally important we have the web-server administrators & installers that ensure that everything runs as it should. Officially speaking they are network administrator specialists though.

Web-developers are the most technically apt of all. They won't simply know 'HTML', CSS & XML, but will have also learnt 'proper' programming languages such as 'PHP', ASP.net, Visual Basic, 'C#', 'Java' among others. Quite a few also possess a good knowledge of 'SQL', the database language - because the data on most large modern web sites is stored in this particular language. Most e-commerce websites aren't actually the result of a big team of web designers who've created thousands of web-pages in a lay-out form. What commonly happens is a place-holder template is created, & the contents are automatically inserted from a database to the web-site. So as well as significantly greater efficiencies with the site construct, this process also allows for an infinitely more consistent look and feel as well.

Obviously there are crossovers with many of these tasks - in-fact we have connections with quite a few web-site designers who're capable in many of them. Nevertheless, it will take time to acquire that amount of skill. A web design training course therefore that can equip you to enter the market should encompass the following disciplines - First of all, an introduction to basic web-design, followed by training in Adobe Dreamweaver & an overview of the principal aspects of Adobe 'Flash'. Next you must understand the 'coding' languages 'HTML' & CSS, & after that be trained in a synopsis of how e-commerce works. 'PHP' must be learned so 'dynamic' web sites can be built (ASP.Net is far more involved, and PHP is easier to get into initially,) & a basic idea of Databases and 'SEO' should be achieved. All this is just to get to a level of technical competence where you can work with a broad enough variety of sites. Much like learning to drive, you must first acquire the physical skill-sets, before you can effectively move past them & accomplish a degree of finesse. You'd have to give yourself somewhere around 400-500 hours to study & effectively learn a broad-ranging program such as this - so if your aim is to do this along-side full-time work it could be completed within 12 months. An experienced advisor will be able to assist you to plan the right path through this quagmire of professional training, & we strongly suggest that you plan your track carefully before you start your training.

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