Its reasonable to say that perhaps one of the most broadly interpreted and improperly perceived terms within I.T. is the expression Web-Designer. Web-Design incorporates a lot of diverse facets, and an understanding of these may help anybody seeking to get into the industry. There are fundamentally 2 elements to web-design - the 'technical' process & the creative design part. The average laptop or computer user considers web-site designers are responsible for how a site looks and feels. Meaning a 'web-designer' is basically an 'artist' with some technical instruction. In reality every web designer's occupation is an inter-related mixture of technical expertise & design creativity - and the two things have become quite hard to split up. It will become a bit more evident how things sit together when we break the profession down into its component parts.

Firstly, we've got graphic artists, who design and assemble the graphic icons & images which we see on a web-page. They most often make this happen by utilising graphic lay-out and animation software (like Adobe Flash and Photoshop), and are not strictly web site designers per-se. Virtually all graphic-artists went to university or college, and have a background in art & design. This particular role is a lot more about a creative artistic expertise than any other function.

Then we have the web-designers, who produce the layout and overall 'feel' of a website using a design-environment such as Adobe Dreamweaver. They use the visuals completed by the graphic-artist, & together their client produce an emerging look & 'navigational' framework for the brand new website. An amateur web designer often starts with the form of a web site, rather than the 'function'. But, to actually produce a valuable website, you must begin with a clear understanding of what you require the web site to really do. This might be an online inventory of products and services, or possibly it's an E-commerce site that wants to be ready to sell straight from the page. It's possible you'll want to highlight products and services via video and a largely 'graphical' inter-face, or maybe it is predominantly an 'informational' web site where the necessity is simple access to key text content (like this website.) No matter what the customer needs from a web site, the fundamental prerequisite is that it meets the basic specification. There's little value in building a visually inspiring website that is impossible for people to find their way around! A professional web designer must effectively develop an on-line 'experience' that is both gratifying & instinctive for those visiting the web-site - that way they'll visit again and again.

Further skillsets which are very useful to commercial web designers are an understanding of project management and e-commerce. 'Search Engine Optimisation' (SEO) is another area that deals with how a site is listed with search engines like google - in order that it can be easily found (this is almost an entire job in itself.) And of course, we should not overlook the web server administrators and installers who stay behind the scenes ensuring everything works properly; although they generally originate from a network administration background.

It's important to appreciate that even the finest web design programs can only teach you the methods and processes - not one can turn you into a bona fide web-designer. As you complete your training course, take the time to build & develop a broad range of your own web-sites to produce a collection of your work. Make websites about your favourite hobby, your family, a favourite music group or TV programme. Start interactive web-sites and generate 'traffic' to them. Adobe accreditations are useful, but showing how you can use what you've learned says a lot more about you as a web designer!

The Adobe Creative Suite is the most commercially-popular design environment utilised by web site designers today. These vital applications are now (2010) on Version 4. 'Dreamweaver' is the software program which builds website pages, with 'Flash' delivering usage of animated & interactive graphical content. 'Dreamweaver' might be looked at as a rather fancy Word Processor in many ways. Within certain rules and constraints, it lets you display text and graphics, and then through a procedure known as page-linking you can produce basic inter-activity within the web-site. Dreamweaver (as with any web design environment) produces HTML ('Hyper Text Markup Language') program code in the background. HTML is a script which essentially 'draws' and controls the web-page displayed on your screen. It is the language of web-browsers. Lay-out tag languages like XML and CSS are matched up with HTML. Because these tag languages are 'standardised', the smoother and rather more efficient results function successfully on a number of different platforms. The concept is that the web page will appear identical on any web browser, whether it is 'Mozilla Firefox', 'Internet Explorer', Safari, Opera or whatever. And so although you're placing graphic blocks and text, behind the scenes, 'Dreamweaver' is turning this in to code. A well-rounded knowledge of these various languages is critical if you are going to be a commercially viable web designer.

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