No doubt one of the most mis-understood & over-worked titles within the I.T. market today has to be the term 'Web Designer'? In fact, web-design does include a lot of different aspects, & so it might help to simplify things a little if we break it down. Web Design incorporates the 'technical' components of a successful site as well as the creative elements. The majority of people think a 'web-designer' is someone who is responsible for the visible areas of the web-site. Many of us will consider a 'web-designer' a form of 'artist'. In reality every web designer's career is an 'inter-related' blend of 'technical' know-how and design creativity - and the two have become very hard to split up. It becomes more evident how things fit together if we split the work down into it's various roles.

Graphic artists should come 1st - they design and build the icons and pictures for a web page. These are not strictly web-designers per-se, and most of the time are multi-media artists making use of graphic layout & 'animation' software, (for instance Adobe 'Photoshop' and Adobe 'Flash'.) The majority have been through higher-education, typically with a degree-level art background. Clearly, this job demands a solid artistic bent.

Web-site designers are second - they employ design-software such as Dreamweaver to plan and design the look and feel of the website. They take on the visuals done by the artist, and alongside their client generate an initial style and navigational composition for the new webpage. A lot of novice web-site designers put emphasis first of all on the 'format' of the website, as opposed to its function. Yet, to actually develop a valuable web-site, you have to start with a clear understanding of what you require the web site to actually do. It could be an online catalogue of merchandise, or maybe its an E-commerce website that wants to have the facility sell straight from the site. It's possible you need to show off merchandise by way of video & a largely 'graphical' interface, or maybe it's largely an 'informational' web site where the necessity is easy access to key text content (such as this website.) No matter what the client would like from a web-site, the basic requirement is that it actually fulfils the basic needs. There is no point building a visually inspiring web site that's difficult for anyone to find their way around! A good web designer must effectively create an online 'experience' that's both gratifying & user-friendly for the people coming to the site - then they will visit again and again.

The most technically apt web experts are generally the web-developers. As well as being proficient in 'HTML', XML & CSS, web-developers will understand other 'proper' programming languages like VB, 'PHP', Java, C# and ASP.net for example. And since most modern websites of any kind of size 'store' their data using 'SQL' database technology, they are also likely to have got a firm grip SQL also. A typical E-commerce website does not have a team of web-site designers who have developed it's 1000s of web-pages in lay-out form. More usually, after the construction of a place-holder template, the material will be extracted from a Database and dynamically inserted. This makes not only the construction, management & up-dates hugely more efficient, it equally tends to make a far more consistent site.

Naturally there are crossovers with a lot of these functions - in-fact we have contacts with a number of web-designers who are competent in many of them. You will need time though to develop such an array of commercial skill-sets. You'll need to be taught several things on a commercially feasible web-design training program: A synopsis of the basic fundamentals of web-design first of all, then directly into using Dreamweaver to a commercial standard and the key nuances of Flash too. This would then move onto an understanding of HTML and 'CSS', with some training into the area of E-commerce. To construct dynamic sites you'll need to learn PHP, which is a less arduous programming language to start off in than ASP.NET. You additionally need a basic grasp of Databases and SEO. All this is simply to get to a standard of competence technically whereby you can work with a wide enough variety of websites. The actual physical skills must develop first, before you can fine tune them to a natural flowing style - much like when you learned to drive your first car. You would need to allow something like 400-500 hours to study & effectively master a wide ranging training-program like this - therefore if your plan is to do this along with employment it could be carried out within one year. Careful preparation to get the right training course for you is a worthwhile investment of your time - knowledgeable training advisors can help you to sort the best way forward before you decide to get going.

The design-environments used by web-site designers are their key resources. Adobe Creative Suite 4 is the most commercially accepted in the market these days (as of '10). 'Dreamweaver' is the software program that builds web sites, with Flash delivering usage of interactive & animated 'graphical' content. Dreamweaver could be considered a 'glorified' Word Processor in lots of ways. Graphics and text can be displayed (within known limits) & then a basic inter-activity can be produced through page linking. Dreamweaver (or any other web design environment) produces 'HTML' (HyperText Markup Language) program-code in the background. Basically, this 'language of web browsers' is a 'script' which 'draws' & controls the page being looked at. Lay-out tag languages like CSS & XML are associated with HTML. These allow more stream-lined HTML code and more efficient layout techniques, which will work on multiple-platforms (as they are 'standardised'). What this means is the page will appear the same on Microsoft 'Internet Explorer', Mozilla Firefox, Opera, 'Safari' etc. (at least, that's the plan!) Consequently the graphic-blocks you're laying & the text you're putting in is being turned into coding behind the scenes by Dreamweaver. Its essential to achieve an in depth knowledge of these types of 'languages' to be able to be a website designer at a commercial level.

Additional skill-sets that are important for professional web designers are a knowledge of project management and e-commerce. Another field - which isn't to be underestimated - is SEO ('Search Engine Optimisation'). This is focused on how to optimize website indexation on search engines like 'Google' and 'Yahoo'. And of course, we should not overlook the web server administrators & installers that sit in the background ensuring the whole thing works; though they typically come from a network-administration background.

The main factor to emphasise is that the training itself will not make you a web-designer; it will merely coach you on the methods. Throughout your training & study, you must apply yourself to building and creating as many web-sites as you can, to prepare and assemble your own portfolio. Build web sites about your favourite hobby, your dog, a favourite band or even TV show. Start to build inter-active websites and create 'traffic' to them. Adobe accreditations are useful, but how you can implement the training says a lot more about you as a web-designer!

IT PC Training >>