Probably one of the most misunderstood & over-worked expressions within the I.T. sector nowadays has to be the words Web-Designer? If you're wanting to get in to the market, some details about the distinct facets ought to help to de-mystify things. You'll find there are fundamentally two elements to web-design - the 'technical' process & the creative 'design' side. To the average person on the street, a 'web-designer' is somebody that creates the look & 'feel' of a site. To put it differently, they look at web-site designers as 'artists' in the main. The truth is the modern web designer's function is an inter-related combination of 'technical' knowledge and design creativity - & the two things are becoming very hard to separate. If you break down web-design in to it's component functions, then it will become more apparent how everything fits together.

Graphic-artists are 1st - they design and build the icons & pictures for a webpage. They most frequently bring this about by using graphic lay-out & animation software (such as Adobe Flash & Photoshop), and aren't strictly web-designers per-se. Generally, they will have come from an art background, & may possibly have undertaken studies at university level. Above all else, this work demands a strong artistic talent.

Web designers are next - these people utilise design software like Dreamweaver to plan & design the look & 'feel' of the web site. They take on the graphics created by the graphic-artist, and together their client generate an initial style & 'navigational' composition for the brand new webpage. A web designer with fairly limited knowledge may very well start with the 'form' rather than the function of a web-site. To create a good internet site however, it is vital that you first look at what you actually would like the site to do. It could be its effectively a web-based brochure, or an e-commerce web site where items are available directly. Or maybe it will incorporate a lot of video & heavy graphics. Then again it could be largely an information site, where it's important to provide simple access to relevant web pages of wording. Whatever the purchaser needs from a site, the essential necessity is that it actually addresses the basic specification. There's little point creating a visually exciting website that is hopeless for people to get what they want from it! The over-riding purpose of every professional web designers is to have people pay a visit to their web site on a regular basis - so it needs to be a relaxed & enjoyable experience.

It's important to appreciate that even the finest web design programs can only provide you with the methods & procedures - none of them will be able to convert you in to a bona fide web-designer. Throughout your study & training, you should spend time building and developing as many web-sites as you possibly can, to practice & build your own portfolio. Produce web sites about your favourite hobby, your pet, a favourite music group or even TV programme. Create an interactive web-site, and begin building 'traffic' towards it. 'Adobe' accreditations are very useful, but how you can implement what you've learned says a lot more about you as a web-designer!

Web 'developers' are the most technically trained of all. These people won't just know HTML, CSS and 'XML', but they will have learned more official programming languages such as PHP, ASP.Net, 'VB', C#, Java and others. They will also generally have a solid knowledge of 'SQL' Database technology, because this is how most contemporary substantial websites store their information. The majority of e-commerce websites are not the result of a sizable crew of designers who've constructed thousands of web pages in a layout format. Instead, a place holder template will have been created, & the contents will be dynamically fed from a Database. In addition to being hugely more efficient to construct, manage and up-date, it also helps with the feel of the website being constant.

Many independent web-site designers can carry out several of these functions themselves; indeed we liaise with quite a few who can regularly. Nevertheless, it will take quite some time to acquire that level of expertise. A web design program therefore that can equip you to get into the workplace should encompass the following disciplines - A basic introduction to web-design, followed by how to use Adobe 'Dreamweaver' & have a basic knowledge of Adobe Flash. This should then lead on to a knowledge of HTML & CSS, followed by some coaching into the field of e-commerce. To construct dynamic web sites it's important to gain knowledge of 'PHP', which is an easier programming-language to get into than ASP.NET. You also need a rudimentary understanding of Databases and SEO. Learning these skillsets will give you a chance to start working on a decent cross-section of web-sites. As with anything, we have to learn how to actually do the physical skillsets initially, and then build greater finesse by way of experience and practice. A thorough training-program like this could require close to four to five hundred hrs of part time study & practice and therefore can be successfully completed part time over 12 months. As there are lots of points to consider, it's worth finding the time to look closely at any training-programs you're interested in. Talk to somebody with industry knowledge who can help you put things together.

Extra skillsets which are important for commercial web-site designers are an understanding of project management & E-commerce. Another area - that is not to be under-estimated - is 'SEO' (Search Engine Optimisation). This is all about how to optimise web-site indexation on Search Engines like 'Google' & 'Yahoo'. And behind the scenes but very crucially are the web server installers and administrators that ensure that everything works efficiently. Strictly speaking they are network administrator experts though.

The 'Adobe Creative Suite' is regarded as the most commercially popular design-environment used by web site designers nowadays. These vital programs are currently (2010) on Version 4. 'Dreamweaver' is the software program which builds web sites, with Flash delivering usage of animated and interactive graphical content material. You could actually claim that 'Dreamweaver' is the Word Processor of the Adobe Creative Suite range. It lets you place graphics and text in accordance with particular parameters and rules, and then build basic interactivity through page-linking. 'Dreamweaver' (as with any web design environment) creates HTML (Hyper-Text-Markup-Language) program-code in the background. 'HTML' is a script which in essence draws & controls the web page displayed on your monitor. Its the language of web browsers. Matched with 'HTML' are the lay-out 'tag' languages like XML & CSS. These tag languages allow more streamlined HTML coding and more efficient lay-out techniques, which will work on multiple platforms (because they're 'standardised'). So whatever web browser somebody uses, (Internet Explorer, Firefox, 'Opera' etc.) the web-page will hopefully appear exactly the same. So although you lay the graphic-blocks and put in the text, Dreamweaver is turning this into code behind the scenes. If you are going to be a commercially viable website designer, you will have to have an in-depth knowledge of these types of languages.

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