Surely one of the most mis-understood and over-worked titles within the IT sector nowadays must be the words Web Designer? For anybody looking to get in to the marketplace, some details of the different aspects ought to help to de-mystify things. You'll find there are essentially two elements to web-design - the 'technical' process & the creative 'design' side. Many people assume a 'web-designer' is someone who creates the visual aspects of the web-site. Many people will consider a 'web-designer' a type of artist. But in actuality, in modern-day web design its becoming more and more difficult to separate the 'technical' side from the 'creative' part, as both of them are so intertwined. It becomes much more apparent just how things fit together if we break the job down in to its component roles.

Graphic artists come 1st - these people design & assemble the symbols and images for a web-site. In real terms, graphic-artists usually aren't really web designers. More usually they're multi-media artists that use software like Adobe Photoshop and 'Flash' to produce their end results. Most graphic-artists attended university, with a background in art and design. This particular area is much more about a creative artistic ability than anything else.

Web designers are second - they utilise design software like Adobe Dreamweaver to create & design the 'look' and 'feel' of the web site. They take the work completed by the graphic artist, and together their client develop an emerging style & navigational composition for the brand new web-site. A web designer with only limited understanding might begin with the 'form' rather than the 'function' of a website. In order to develop a successful website though, it's crucial to first of all look at what you actually would like the web site to do. It's possible it's essentially an on-line inventory, or an E-commerce web site where goods are sold directly. Or potentially it will incorporate lots of video & graphics. Then again it might be predominantly an info site, where its essential to supply straightforward access to appropriate web pages of wording. Regardless of what you need from a web site, it must - at it's most elementary level - fulfil the function for which it's intended. There is little point making a visually impressive web-site that is hopeless for people to get to where they want! A professional web designer must in essence produce an on-line 'experience' that's both gratifying & instinctive for those visiting the web site - that way they will visit more than once.

The most important tools employed by web designers are their design-environments, with Adobe Creative Suite (currently in Version 4 as of '09/10) being essentially the most popular commercially. The software that builds web-sites is Adobe Dreamweaver, & 'Adobe Flash' gives access to graphical content material that can be interactive & animated. In a great many ways we could possibly view Dreamweaver as a glorified Word-Processor. Within particular rules & constraints, it lets you place graphics and text, & then through a procedure called page-linking you can generate basic inter-activity inside the web-site. As with other web design-environments, 'Dreamweaver' produces the program code HTML in the background (HTML is short for Hyper Text Markup Language). 'HTML' is a script which in simple terms draws and controls the web page displayed on your monitor. It's the language of browsers. Layout tag 'languages' like CSS & XML are associated with HTML. These tag languages enable more streamlined 'HTML' coding & more efficient lay-out techniques, which will work on multiple-platforms (as they are 'standardised'). The theory is that the web-page will appear the same on any web browser, whether it is 'Mozilla Firefox', 'Internet Explorer', 'Safari', Opera or whichever. And so although you are placing graphic blocks and text, in the background, 'Dreamweaver' is turning what you're doing into code. It's vitally important to achieve an in-depth understanding of these various 'languages' if you wish to be a web designer at the commercial level.

Commercial web-site designers can also up-grade their offering if they choose to branch-out into fields like project management and E-commerce for instance. Another discipline - that isn't to be underestimated - is SEO (Search Engine Optimisation). This is all about how to optimize website indexation on search engines like Google and 'Yahoo'. And behind the scenes but vitally important we have the web server administrators and installers who ensure that the whole thing runs smoothly. Technically these people are network-administrator professionals though.

The key point to stress is the fact that training program itself will not make you a web-designer; it will simply provide you with the techniques. As you complete your training course, make an effort to construct and develop a good selection of your own websites to produce a collection of your work. Design web-sites about a hobby, your dog, a favourite band or TV show. You might even set up inter-active web sites and get 'traffic' on them. Anything you do will add to your CV, & illustrate more to a recruiter than an Adobe certificate.