Surely just about one of the most mis-interpreted and over-worked expressions in the IT sector these days has to be the term 'Web-Designer'? In fact, web design does consist of a variety of distinct fields, and so it may well help to clarify things a little when we go through each one. You'll find there are fundamentally 2 elements to web design - the 'technical' process and the 'creative' design side. To the person on the street, a web designer is somebody that creates the look and 'feel' of a web-site. Lots of people may consider a web designer a type of 'artist'. However, a commercial web designer will in fact be as occupied with the technical side of things as much as the 'creative' element. If you break down web-design in to its component tasks, then it will become more apparent how each thing fits together.

Firstly, there are the graphic artists, that design and construct the graphic icons & pictures that we see on any web-page. Most often they do this by making use of graphic lay-out and animation software (such as Adobe Flash and 'Photoshop'), & are generally not actually web-designers per-se. The majority have come from higher-education, with typically a degree standard art qualification. Obviously, this particular job requires a good artistic flair.

Second of all, there are the site designers, that utilise design environments such as Dreamweaver to produce the lay-out and feel of the web site. They use the visuals done by the graphic-artist, & in conjunction with their client produce an emerging style and navigational framework for the brand-new web site. A good number of novice web-site designers place emphasis to start with on the format of the website, rather than its function. To be able to develop an effective web site though, it's crucial that you first of all look at what you essentially need the web-site to accomplish. Is it principally an E-commerce web-site, which would need to have the facility take payments safely and securely, or is it perhaps an online product brochure listing? Maybe you want to present items by means of video & a heavily graphical inter-face, or maybe it is mainly an informational site where the requirement is easy access to key text content (such as this particular website.) Regardless of what you want from a web-site, it must - at its simplest level - fulfil the function for which it's intended. There's little value in producing a visually inspiring site that's extremely hard for anyone to find their way around! A professional web designer must in essence create an online 'experience' that is both fulfilling and user-friendly for the people visiting the site - that way they will come back again.

Supplemental skills which are very useful to professional web-designers are a knowledge of project-management and e-commerce. Another area - that is not to be under-estimated - is SEO ('Search Engine Optimisation'). This is all about how to optimise website indexation on Search Engines like 'Google' & 'Yahoo'. And behind the scenes but hugely important are the web-server administrators & installers that ensure that the whole thing runs smoothly. Technically speaking they are network-administrator specialists though.

The 'Adobe Creative Suite' is regarded as the most commercially-popular design environment employed by web site designers right now. These essential applications are currently ('10) on Version 4. Whilst 'Adobe Flash' gives access to animated & interactive graphical content, Dreamweaver is the software program that builds web-sites. 'Dreamweaver' may be looked at as a 'glorified' Word-Processor in many ways. Text and graphics can be layed (within known rules) & then a basic interactivity can be established by page-linking. HTML (Hyper Text Mark-up Language) program coding is produced behind the scenes with 'Dreamweaver', as with any other web design environment. HTML is a script which basically draws and controls the web-page on your screen. It's the 'language' of web-browsers. Associated with 'HTML' are the lay-out 'tag' 'languages' like XML & CSS. As they are 'standardised', these tag languages will work on multiple platforms to facilitate more stream-lined 'HTML' code and more efficient layout techniques. The theory being that the web-page will appear exactly the same on any internet browser, whether it's Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari, 'Opera' or whichever. And so although you are laying graphic-blocks and adding text, behind the scenes, Dreamweaver is converting what you're doing into 'code'. A well-rounded knowledge of these types of 'languages' is critical if you're to become a commercially viable web designer.

The most technically trained internet professionals are generally the web developers. These people will not just understand 'HTML', CSS & 'XML', but will have learnt more official programming-languages like PHP, ASP.net, VB, 'C#', Java and the like. Quite a few also have got an effective knowledge of SQL, the database-language - as the data on many sizable modern websites is stored in this language. A regular e-commerce web site doesn't have a bunch of web-site designers who have created it's 1000s of web-pages in lay-out form. Instead, a place holder 'template' will have been built, & the details will be dynamically loaded from a database. This process makes not only the construction, management & upgrades massively more straighforward, it equally makes for a more consistent website.

The most important factor to stress is the fact that training alone won't make you a web-designer; it will simply educate you on the techniques. As you work on your training course, make an effort to put together and develop a wide range of your own websites to produce a portfolio of your work. Your own web-sites should be about anything you like - the local music-scene, horses, an author you enjoy or motor bikes. Start inter-active web-sites and create traffic on to them. Adobe qualifications are useful, but how you can use what you've learned says far more about you as a web-designer!

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