Without doubt just about one of the most misinterpreted and over-worked expressions within the IT sector these days has to be the words 'Web-Designer'? Web Design incorporates a number of distinct aspects, and a good understanding of these facets can help anybody wanting to get in to the industry. You'll find there are fundamentally 2 sides to web-design - the technical process and the 'creative' 'design' side. The typical computer user believes web-designers determine how a web-site 'looks' and feels. A lot of people will consider a 'web designer' a sort of 'artist'. But in reality, within modern-day web design it is becoming increasingly difficult to split up the technical part from the 'creative' part, because both are so inter-twined. If you break web design down in to its various tasks, then it becomes much more obvious how everything sits together.

Graphic artists are first - these people design and construct the icons & images for a website. They most often do this by utilising graphic layout and 'animation' software (like Adobe 'Flash' & Photoshop), & are not strictly web-designers per-se. Most graphic artists have been to university, with a qualification in art and design. More than anything else, this specific work requires a strong artistic talent.

Second, there are the web-site designers, that use design environments such as Adobe Dreamweaver to set-up the lay-out and 'feel' of the website. They work with the graphics which are produced by the artist, & work with their clients to start to develop the 'feel' & 'navigational' structure of the website. A web-designer with limited knowledge may well start with the form instead of the 'function' of a website. If you want to build a successful web site though, its vital that you first of all look at what you really want the web site to accomplish. It could be an online inventory of items, or possibly it's an e-commerce web-site that requires to have the ability to sell directly from the site. Perhaps you'll want to showcase goods through video and a heavily graphical interface, or it could be its mostly an 'informational' site where the necessity is easy access to essential text information (such as this particular website.) Whatever the client needs from a web-site, the fundamental necessity is that it fulfils the basic needs. So many websites look amazing but are a headache to 'navigate' & find where you want - & so users leave & never return. The overriding aim of every good site designers is to have people pay a visit to their website repeatedly - therefore it needs to be a relaxed and gratifying experience.

The 'Adobe Creative Suite' is the most commercially-popular design-environment employed by web-site designers these days. These essential applications are now ('10) on Version 4. 'Dreamweaver' is the software which builds web sites, with Flash delivering access to interactive and animated graphical content. In some ways we might see Dreamweaver as a rather fancy Word-Processor. Graphics and text can be placed (within certain rules) & then a basic inter-activity can be produced by way of page-linking. HTML ('Hyper Text Markup Language') program coding is developed behind the scenes with 'Dreamweaver', just as with any web design-environment. This is the language of web browsers, and is a 'script' which in essence 'draws' and controls the web page you are looking at. Lay-out tag 'languages' like CSS & XML are paired with 'HTML'. As they are standardised, these will work on multiple platforms to allow more streamlined 'HTML' coding and more efficient layout techniques. Therefore the web page will look exactly the same on MS Internet Explorer, 'Mozilla Firefox', Opera, 'Safari' etc. (at least, that's the plan!) Consequently the graphic blocks you're placing & the text you are adding is being turned into coding in the background by Dreamweaver. If you are planning to be a commercially viable web designer, you will need an in-depth understanding of these languages.

Professional web-site designers may also enhance their offering if they choose to branch-out into areas like project-management & E-commerce for example. SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) expertise is very useful for web-experts - this concerns the art of getting internet sites to or near the top of the search engines for frequently used search terms. And of course, we shouldn't overlook the web-server installers & administrators who sit behind the scenes ensuring the whole thing functions as it should; although they typically come from a network administration background.

Obviously there are cross-overs with a lot of these tasks - in-fact we have interactions with several web designers who're competent in most of them. But that level of understanding will take a while to master. A web-design training course therefore that will equip you to enter the workplace should contain the following disciplines - First, an introduction to basic web-design, followed by teaching in Adobe 'Dreamweaver' & a synopsis of the main components of Adobe 'Flash'. The languages of 'HTML' & CSS need to be covered next, with some E-commerce teaching built-in here. Some database & SEO knowledge is crucial, & an awareness of the programming-language PHP (instead of the more complicated ASP.NET) for you to build dynamic sites. All of this is just to get to a level of ability technically whereby you can work with a wide enough array of web sites. Much like taking driving lessons, you have to first develop the actual physical skills, before you effectively progress beyond them and achieve a certain amount of 'finesse'. You'd need to give yourself approximately four hundred to five hundred hours to study and competently grasp a broad ranging training-program of this nature - therefore if your aim is to accomplish this along-side full-time work it could be completed within 12 months. As there are lots of areas to consider, it's well worth making the effort to look carefully at any training-programs you're interested in. Speak to somebody with knowledge of the industry to help you sort things out.

Web developers are the most technically trained of all. These people won't just know HTML, 'CSS' & XML, but will have learned more official programming languages like 'PHP', 'ASP.Net', Visual Basic, C#, Java among others. And since most contemporary internet sites of any size 'store' their information using SQL database-technology, they're also likely to have a solid handle on this also. The majority of e-commerce internet sites aren't actually the result of a big team of designers who have created countless web-pages in a layout format. What commonly happens is a place holder template is created, and the details are dynamically fed from a database to the site. In addition to being vastly more efficient to build, manage and update, it also aids in the 'feel' of the website being consistent.

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