It's reasonable to state that one of the most widely interpreted and poorly perceived terms within I.T. is the label Web Designer. In truth, web-design does contain a variety of different fields, and so it may help to simplify things when we break it down. Web-Design involves the technical elements of a website and also the 'creative' elements. Most people imagine a web-designer is somebody who is in charge of the visual aspects of the site. Many people will consider a 'web-designer' a kind of 'artist'. Yet, a professional 'web-designer' will in fact be as involved with the 'technical' element of things as they are with the creative element. It becomes a little more evident how things sit together if we split the work up into it's component roles.

The people that design & construct the pictures & graphic-icons to go on a web-site are generally known as graphic-artists. Most are not strictly site designers per-se, & by and large are multi-media artists utilising graphic lay-out and animation software, (for instance Adobe Photoshop and Adobe 'Flash'.) Most graphic artists have been to university, with a qualification in art & design. Evidently, this role involves a solid artistic flair.

Site designers are next - these people employ design software such as Adobe 'Dreamweaver' to prepare & design the look & 'feel' of the web site. They make use of the actual visuals that are supplied by the artist, & talk with their client to start to create the feel and navigational framework of the website. A good number of novice web-site designers put emphasis to start with on the 'format' of the web-site, instead of it's 'function'. Although, to really build a useful web-site, you need to start with a clear understanding of what you need the web site to really do. Is it predominantly an e-commerce website, which wants to be able to receive payments securely, or is it perhaps an on-line product catalogue listing? Maybe much like this web-site the key function is easy access to relevant info, or perhaps it's going to be a showcase for items by means of video & a heavily graphical inter-face. No matter what you need from a web site, it must - at it's most basic level - carry out the function for which its intended. There's no value in designing a visually inspiring site that is extremely hard for anyone to navigate! The purpose of any reputable web-designer is first & foremost to design an experience that people enjoy and feel relaxed with - so that they come back again & again.

Naturally you'll find crossovers with many of these functions - we ourselves have interactions with a number of web-site designers who're competent in a lot of them. Nevertheless, it takes quite some time to develop that much expertise. A web design course therefore that will equip you to get into the work-place must encompass the following - A basic introduction to web-design, and then how to use Adobe 'Dreamweaver' and have a basic knowledge of Adobe Flash. This should then lead on to an understanding of 'HTML' & 'CSS', followed by some training into the area of E-commerce. 'PHP' really should be covered so 'dynamic' sites can be constructed (ASP.Net is actually much more involved, & PHP is easier to get into at first,) & a basic understanding of Databases & SEO should be achieved. All of this is basically to get to a level of technical ability where you can work with a broad enough variety of websites. Similar to when you were learning to drive, you have to first acquire the physical skillsets, before you can essentially move beyond them and achieve a degree of finesse. You would have to allow somewhere around 400 - 500 hrs to study and properly master a wide ranging training program like this - therefore if your aim is to get this done along-side employment it could be done within 12 months. An experienced advisor will be able to assist you to plan your way through this labyrinth of professional training, & we highly recommend that you allow time to plan your track with care before you start your web design training.

The most important resources utilised by web designers are the design environments, with Adobe Creative Suite (currently in version 4 as of 2009/2010) being essentially the most commercially popular. Whilst 'Adobe Flash' provides access to animated and interactive 'graphical' content material, 'Dreamweaver' is the software program which builds web pages. In many ways we could look at 'Dreamweaver' as a rather fancy Word-Processor. It lets you place text and graphics according to particular parameters & rules, and then develop basic interactivity via page-linking. Dreamweaver (or any other web design environment) creates 'HTML' (Hyper-Text-Markup-Language) program code behind the scenes. Basically, this 'language of web browsers' is a 'script' that draws and controls the web-page being watched. Matched with 'HTML' are the layout tag languages like CSS & XML. These tag languages enable more streamlined HTML code & more effective lay-out methods, that will work on multiple-platforms (because they're 'standardised'). What this means is the web-page will appear the same on Microsoft 'Internet Explorer', Mozilla Firefox, 'Opera', Safari and so on. (at least, that's the idea!) As a result the graphic blocks you're laying and the text you're adding is being turned into code in the background by Dreamweaver. It's very important to have a thorough understanding of these types of 'languages' in order to be a web designer at the commercial standard.

The one thing you need to understand is absolutely no training course can actually make a web designer out of you. The actual course will simply cover all the techniques and skills. During your study & training, you must apply yourself to building and creating as many web-sites as possible, to prepare and assemble your portfolio. Your web sites can be about anything - your local music scene, horses, a writer you admire or performance cars. You could even create inter-active websites and get traffic on them. All this will seem much more constructive on your CV, and in your portfolio, than a certificate from Adobe will!

Professional web-designers may also improve their offering if they choose to branch out in to fields such as project management and e-commerce for example. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is another field which deals with how a web site is indexed with search engines like google - to ensure that it may be more easily found (this is almost a whole job in itself.) Also of course, we must not forget the web server administrators and installers that work in the background making sure everything works; though they normally originate from a network administration background.

Web developers are the most technically apt of all. Not only will these people understand the languages already mentioned, they will also have studied additional languages, for instance 'C#', 'VB', PHP, 'Java', 'ASP.Net' and others. And since most modern websites of any size store their data using SQL database-technology, they're also likely to have got a firm grip on this as well. In reality, it is unlikely that a big E-commerce site has been put together in lay-out format by a team of web-site designers. Instead, a place holder template will have been built, & the contents will be dynamically loaded from a Database. So as well as significantly larger efficiency with the web site build, using this method also makes for a much more uniform look & 'feel' as well.

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