Its reasonable to say that perhaps one of the most widely interpreted & poorly understood terms in IT is the label 'Web Designer'. Website Design takes on board a lot of diverse facets, and a good understanding of these facets can help anyone seeking to get in to the industry. Basically, there are two key areas to web design; the creative element and the technical side. Most people think that a web designer is somebody that is responsible for the visible areas of the website. Meaning a web designer is essentially an artist who has had some 'technical' instruction. But in fact, within modern day web design it is becoming more and more difficult to split up the 'technical' part from the creative aspect, because both of them are so intertwined. When you break web design down into its component tasks, then it will become more obvious how everything fits together.

First, we have the graphic artists, who design & put together the graphic icons and images which we see on a web page. They most frequently bring this about by using graphic lay-out & animation software (like Adobe Flash and Photoshop), & are generally not strictly web site designers per-se. Normally, they will have an art background, & may have undertaken studies at college or university level. This role is more about creative expertise than anything else.

Secondly, there are the web site designers, that utilise design environments like Adobe 'Dreamweaver' to set-up the layout & 'feel' of the web page. They take the work done by the graphic-artist, and along with their client generate an initial style and navigational structure for the brand new web-site. A large number of novice web-site designers concentrate first of all on the format of the website, instead of it's 'function'. However, you should essentially start with an understanding of the 'functions' it's required to carry out to create a really effective web site. Is it primarily an E-commerce web site, which wants to have the capacity to receive payments securely, or is it an online product or service brochure listing? Maybe you need to highlight products and solutions by way of video and a largely graphical inter-face, or maybe its largely an 'informational' web-site where the need is easy access to essential text content (like this particular site.) Whatever the customer wants from a site, the fundamental prerequisite is that it fulfils the basic needs. There's little value in making a visually interesting site that's impossible for people to get what they want from it! The over-riding goal of all good site designers is for people to pay a visit to their web site regularly - so it needs to be a happy and enjoyable experience.

Supplemental skills which are important for professional web designers are a knowledge of project-management & e-commerce. 'SEO' ('Search Engine Optimisation') knowledge is also extremely useful for web experts - this is the art of getting internet sites at or near the top of the Search Engines for frequently used keyword phrases. And of course, we should not overlook the web-server installers and administrators who stay behind the scenes ensuring the whole thing works; although they usually originate from a network administration background.

The key factor to emphasise is that the training program alone won't make you a web-designer; it will merely provide you with the methods. Throughout your training and study, you should apply yourself to constructing & developing as many websites as you can, to prepare & build your own portfolio. Your own sites should be about anything - the local music-scene, farm pets, a writer you enjoy or motor bikes. You could even set up inter-active web sites and get 'traffic' on them. 'Adobe' qualifications are useful, but showing how you can use what you've learned says far more about you as a web designer!

The 'Adobe Creative Suite' is the most commercially-popular design environment employed by web site designers today. These key applications are now ('10) on Version 4. The software program that builds web-sites is Adobe Dreamweaver, and 'Adobe Flash' gives access to graphical content material that can be animated and interactive. You might state that 'Dreamweaver' is the Word-Processor of the Adobe CS range. Within certain rules & parameters, it lets you place text & graphics, & then through a process called page-linking you can produce basic inter-activity within the web-site. HTML (Hyper Text Mark-up Language) program code is created in the background with 'Dreamweaver', just as with any web design environment. 'HTML' is a script which in simple terms 'draws' & controls the page displayed on your monitor. Its the 'language' of browsers. Lay-out 'tag' languages like XML & CSS are matched up with 'HTML'. As these tag 'languages' are 'standardised', the smoother & rather more efficient results function successfully on a number of different platforms. What this means is the web-page looks exactly the same on MS Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Opera, 'Safari' and so on. (or shall we say, that's the idea!) So although you place the graphic-blocks & add the textual content, 'Dreamweaver' is turning this into coding behind the scenes. If you're going to be a commercially viable web designer, you will have to have an in-depth knowledge of these languages.

The most technically-trained web experts are generally the web developers. They will not only know HTML, 'CSS' & XML, but they will have learnt 'proper' programming languages such as PHP, 'ASP.Net', VB, 'C#', Java among others. They will generally also possess a solid understanding of SQL Database technology, as this is one way most contemporary large web sites store their information. In reality, it's un-likely that a big E-commerce website has been built in lay-out format by a bunch of web designers. More commonly, following the formation of a place holder 'template', the material will be extracted from a Database & dynamically inserted. Apart from being massively more efficient to construct, manage & update, it also helps with the 'feel' of the website being consistent.

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