Without doubt just about one of the most misunderstood & generalised expressions within the I.T. market today has to be the words Web Designer? In fact, web design does consist of quite a few different fields, and so it may well help to simplify things a little if we break it down. Web Design involves the technical components of a site in addition to the 'creative' elements. The average PC user considers web-site designers determine how a site looks and feels. Meaning a 'web designer' is fundamentally an 'artist' who has had some 'technical' instruction. But in fact, within modern web-design it is getting more and more difficult to split up the 'technical' side from the creative element, as both of them are so inter-twined. It will become much more evident just how things fit together when we break the profession up into it's various roles.

Individuals who design & assemble the images and graphic icons which go on a web page are called graphic-artists. Strictly speaking, graphic-artists ordinarily are not really web-site designers. More often they're multi-media artists that employ software such as Adobe Photoshop & Flash to create their finished results. Typically, they'll have an artistic background, & could have studied at college or university level. Most importantly, this specific job involves a strong creative ability.

Secondly, we have the site designers, that utilise design environments such as Adobe Dreamweaver to produce the lay-out & feel of the web site. They use the visuals done by the graphic artist, and together with their client produce an emerging style and navigational structure for the brand-new site. A web designer with fairly limited knowledge would probably begin with the 'form' rather than the function of a web site. If you want to construct an effective site though, it's crucial that you first look at what you really would like the web site to accomplish. Is it primarily an E-commerce website, which requires to have the ability to receive payments safely and securely, or is it perhaps an on-line product or service catalogue listing? Or maybe it'll have lots of video and graphics. Then again it may be largely an information site, where its important to supply easy access to specific pages of text. Quite simply the site must have the ability to meet it's required needs - whatever those particular needs are. A lot of websites look amazing but are a nightmare to get around and get where you'd like - & so people move on & never return. A good web designer must effectively create an on-line 'experience' that is both satisfying & instinctive for the people visiting the site - that way they'll visit over and over again.

Web developers are members of the equation, and also the most technically minded. Not only will web-developers know the languages already mentioned, they will also have had training in additional languages, for example 'C#', Visual Basic, 'PHP', Java, ASP.Net etc. And since most modern web-sites of any size 'store' their data using SQL database technology, they're likely to have got a firm handle on this also. In reality, it is not likely that a large E-commerce site has been built in lay-out form by a crew of web-site designers. Rather, a place holder template will have been created, & the details will be 'dynamically' fed from a Database. This not only makes the construction, management & upgrades massively more straighforward, it also creates a more consistent web site.

Other skill sets that are highly relevant to web-site designers in the commercial marketplace are a good grasp of e-commerce and project-management. Another field - that is not to be underestimated - is SEO (Search Engine Optimisation). This is all about how to optimize web-site listings on search engines like Google & 'Yahoo'. And in the background but very crucially we have the web server installers and administrators who ensure that the whole thing operates as it should. Strictly speaking they are network-administrator specialists though.

The thing you need to realise is that no training-course can in fact make a web designer out of you. The actual course will simply cover all the techniques and skills. Throughout your study & training, you should apply yourself to building and creating as many web-sites as you possibly can, to practice & build your own portfolio. A hobby or other interest can be an effective starting place, or simply your favourite animal, or a holiday-resort you particularly enjoyed. Start interactive web sites & generate traffic to them. Everything you do will add to your Curriculum Vitae, and present much more to a company than an 'Adobe' accreditation.

The design-environments utilised by web site designers are their key tools. 'Adobe Creative Suite' 4 is the most commercially popular in the market these days (as of '10). The software program which builds web-sites is 'Adobe Dreamweaver', & Adobe Flash gives access to 'graphical' content that can be animated and interactive. In many ways we could possibly see 'Dreamweaver' as a rather fancy Word-Processor. It enables you to place graphics & text in accordance with particular parameters and rules, & then develop basic inter-activity through page linking. HTML (Hyper Text Mark-up Language) program-coding is created behind the scenes with Dreamweaver, just as with any other web design environment. In essence, this 'language of web browsers' is actually a script which draws and controls the web-page being looked at. Paired with HTML are the lay-out 'tag' 'languages' like XML & CSS. As these tag languages are standardised, the streamlined & rather more efficient results function effectively on a number of different platforms. The idea being that the web-page will appear exactly the same on any web browser, whether it is Mozilla Firefox, 'Internet Explorer', 'Safari', 'Opera' or whichever. So even though you place the graphic-blocks & put in the textual content, Dreamweaver is converting this in to code behind the scenes. If you're planning to be a commercially feasible website designer, you will have to have a thorough understanding of these types of 'languages'.

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