It's fair to say that perhaps one of the more broadly interpreted and badly perceived definitions within IT is the label 'Web-Designer'. If you're wanting to get in to the industry, an explanation of the distinct aspects ought to help to clarify things. There are fundamentally 2 sides to web design - the 'technical' side and the 'creative' 'design' side. To the average man or women on the street, a web designer is someone who creates the look & 'feel' of a site. Which means a web designer is basically an 'artist' with some 'technical' instruction. In fact the present day web-designer's job is an inter-related mixture of technical knowledge and design creativity - & the two are becoming quite difficult to separate. It will become much more evident just how things fit together if we break the work up in to its various roles.

To start with, we have graphic artists, who design and assemble the graphic icons & pictures that you see on any web page. These are not really web-site designers as such, and in many cases are multi-media artists utilising graphic layout and 'animation' software, (like Adobe 'Photoshop' and Adobe Flash.) Frequently, they will have an artistic background, & may have studied at university or college level. This part is much more about a creative artistic expertise than any other function.

Next, there are the web-site designers, who work with design-environments such as Adobe Dreamweaver to set-up the layout and 'feel' of the website. They work with the actual visuals that are created by the graphic artist, & work with the clients to start to create the 'feel' & navigational composition of the website. An amateur web-designer often starts with the form of the site, instead of the function. But, to actually produce a successful site, you must begin with a clear understanding of the things you require the web site to really do. Is it primarily an E-commerce website, which wants to have the capacity to receive payments safely and securely, or is it a web-based product or service catalogue listing? Maybe you need to highlight products and services through video and a heavily graphical interface, or maybe it's largely an informational website where the requirement is easy access to key text data (such as this web-site.) Whatever the purchaser needs from a website, the fundamental requirement is that it addresses the basic specification. So many sites look brilliant but they are a pain to 'navigate' & find what you want - and so people leave and never come back. The overriding purpose of all professional web designers is to have people go to their web-site regularly - so it needs to be a comfortable and pleasant experience.

The most important thing to emphasise is the fact that training program alone will not make you a web designer; it will simply coach you on the techniques. As you get into your training-course, take the time to build and develop a large selection of your own sites to build a portfolio of your work. Design websites about your favourite hobby, your family, your favourite music group or Television show. You could even create inter-active websites & get traffic on them. All this will appear much more constructive on your CV, & in your Portfolio, than a document from Adobe will!

The key resources used by web designers are the design environments, with 'Adobe Creative Suite' (currently in version 4 as of '09/10) being the most commercially popular. Whilst 'Adobe Flash' provides access to animated and interactive 'graphical' content, Dreamweaver is the software which builds web pages. You could actually say that 'Dreamweaver' is the Word Processor of the Adobe CS range. Text and graphics can be layed (within known parameters) and then a basic inter-activity can be established via page-linking. 'HTML' ('Hyper Text Markup Language') program code is produced in the background with 'Dreamweaver', just as with any other web design-environment. Effectively, this 'language of web browsers' is actually a script which draws & controls the web-page being looked at. Lay-out tag 'languages' like CSS & XML are matched up with HTML. As they are standardised, these tag languages can work on multiple-platforms to enable more streamlined 'HTML' coding and more effective lay-out techniques. And so which-ever web browser a person uses, (Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, 'Opera' and so on.) the web-page will ideally look the same. So though you're placing graphic-blocks & text, behind the scenes, 'Dreamweaver' is converting this into 'code'. A well-rounded knowledge of these types of 'languages' is critical if you're to become a commercially viable website designer.

Additional skills that are important to commercial web designers are a knowledge of project-management and E-commerce. 'SEO' (Search Engine Optimisation) knowledge is very valuable for web experts - this concerns the skill of getting internet sites to or near to the top of the Search Engines for commonly used search phrases. And of course, we must not forget the web server administrators & installers who work behind the scenes making sure the whole thing works properly; although they generally come from a network-administration background.

MCSA Networking Technical Support Certification Courses >>