Probably one of the most misunderstood and over-worked expressions within the IT field today must be the term Web-Designer? In truth, web-design does consist of quite a few distinctive aspects, and so it may well help to simplify things a little if we go through each one. There are fundamentally 2 elements to web-design - the 'technical' side and the creative design side. Most people think that a 'web-designer' is somebody who is responsible for the visual aspects of the web-site. Many people will consider a 'web designer' a form of artist. In reality every web designer's function is an 'inter-related' mixture of 'technical' understanding and design creativity - and the two have become very hard to split up. If you break web design down in to it's component tasks, then it becomes much more apparent how everything fits together.

Graphic-artists should come first - they design and construct the icons and images for a website. They are not exactly web designers per-se, & most of the time are multi-media artists employing graphic lay-out and 'animation' software, (such as Adobe 'Photoshop' and Adobe 'Flash'.) The majority have been through higher-education, typically with a degree standard art background. Clearly, this particular role requires a keen artistic ability.

Next, there are the web-designers, who utilise design-environments like Dreamweaver to produce the lay-out and 'feel' of the web page. They make use of the actual visuals that are supplied by the graphic-artist, and work with their client to start to develop the 'feel' & 'navigational' framework of the web-site. Many novice web designers focus to begin with on the format of the web-site, as opposed to its function. Yet, to really produce a valuable site, you need to start with a clear understanding of the things you require the web site to actually do. Is it primarily an E-commerce web site, that needs to have the ability to receive payments securely, or is it perhaps an online product brochure listing? It's possible you'll want to accentuate products and solutions through video & a largely 'graphical' inter-face, or perhaps it is largely an informational web site where the necessity is straightforward access to essential text data (like this particular website.) Regardless of what you need from a website, it must - at it's simplest level - fulfil the 'function' for which it is designed. Such a lot of sites look fantastic but are a pain to navigate & find where you'd like - & so people give up & never come back. A professional web-designer must in essence develop a web-based experience that's both satisfying & user-friendly for the people coming to the web-site - that way they'll visit over and over again.

Professional web designers may also up-grade their offering if they branch out into fields such as project-management and E-commerce for example. Search Engine Optimisation ('SEO') is another area which handles how the website is indexed with Search Engines - so it can be more easily found (this is almost a whole job by itself.) And whilst they typically come from a network administration background, we should remember the incredibly valuable job of the web-server administrators & installers, who keep the whole thing working in the background.

The Adobe Creative Suite is regarded as the most commercially popular design environment used by web-designers today. These valuable programs are currently ('10) on Version 4. Dreamweaver is the software program that builds web sites, with 'Flash' delivering access to interactive & animated graphical content material. In some ways we can view 'Dreamweaver' as a rather fancy Word-Processor. Graphics & text can be layed (within certain parameters) and then a basic interactivity can be created via page-linking. 'Dreamweaver' (or any other web-design environment) produces 'HTML' (HyperText Markup Language) program code behind the scenes. In essence, this language of web-browsers is a script that draws & controls the web page being viewed. Layout 'tag' languages like XML and CSS are matched up with HTML. These enable more streamlined 'HTML' code and more effective lay-out techniques, that will work on multiple platforms (because they are 'standardised'). So no matter which internet browser someone uses, ('Internet Explorer', Firefox, 'Opera' and so on.) the page will (hopefully) look exactly the same. So although you're placing graphic-blocks & adding text, behind the scenes, 'Dreamweaver' is converting this in to 'code'. If you are planning to be commercially feasible as a web designer, you will need an in-depth understanding of these languages.

The one thing you have to understand is no training-course can make a web-designer out of you. The program will merely cover all the skills and techniques. As you work on your training course, spend some time to create and develop a wide range of your own web sites to produce a collection of your work. A pastime or other interest might be a good starting place, or simply your favourite dog, or a holiday-resort you especially liked. Build an interactive site, and begin building 'traffic' towards it. This will all appear more favourable on your Curriculum Vitae, and in your portfolio, than a certificate from 'Adobe' will!

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