Its fair to state that perhaps one of the most widely interpreted and poorly understood definitions within IT is the expression 'Web Designer'. In fact, web design does incorporate several diverse fields, & so it may well help to explain things if we break it down. You'll find there are fundamentally two elements to web design - the technical process and the creative 'design' side. The majority of people believe that a web-designer is somebody who creates the visual aspects of the website. Which means a web designer is fundamentally an artist who has had some technical training. But in actuality, in modern web-design it's getting increasingly difficult to split up the technical part from the creative aspect, because both are so inter-twined. We'll demonstrate this with more clarity when we break web design down into its component parts.

Graphic artists should come 1st - they design and construct the icons & pictures for a webpage. In real terms, graphic artists are not really web site designers. More often they're multi-media artists that work with software like Adobe 'Photoshop' and Flash to generate their results. Frequently, they'll have come from an artistic background, & may possibly have undertaken studies at university or college level. Plainly, this particular job requires a strong artistic flair.

Second, there are the web-site designers, that make use of design environments like Dreamweaver to generate the layout & 'feel' of the webpage. Bu utilising visuals from the artist, they'll create the 'navigational' structure of the web site, keeping in touch with the client to ensure the 'feel' meets their needs. A web-designer with only limited understanding may well start with the form instead of the 'function' of a site. But, you should really start with a grasp of the functions it's required to perform to construct a truly productive web-site. Is it predominantly an e-commerce web site, which would need to have the capacity to take payments securely, or is it an on-line product or service catalogue listing? Or perhaps it will consist of a lot of video and heavy graphics. On the other hand it may be principally an info site, where it's necessary to supply straightforward access to specific web-pages of wording. No matter what you require from a web site, it must - at its most elementary level - fulfil the 'function' for which it is designed. People will leave a site and not return if it's too tricky to get around - however attractive it looks at first glance. The overriding aim of every good web designers is for people to check out their web site repeatedly - therefore it really needs to be a pleasant & satisfying experience.

It's important to realise that even the best web-design courses can only teach you the techniques & processes - not one can convert you in to a professional web designer. Throughout your training & study, you should spend time building and developing as many web-sites as you possibly can, to prepare & build your own portfolio. Your own websites should be about anything - your local music-scene, horses, a writer you enjoy or motorbikes. You might even set up interactive web-sites and get 'traffic' on them. Adobe accreditations are useful, but how you can apply the knowledge says far more about you as a web-designer!

The Adobe Creative Suite is the most commercially-popular design environment used by web designers nowadays. These key applications are now (2010) on Version 4. 'Dreamweaver' is the software that builds web sites, with 'Flash' delivering usage of interactive & animated graphical content. In a great many ways we might look at Dreamweaver as a glorified Word-Processor. Within specific rules & parameters, it enables you to place graphics & text, and then through a method called 'page linking' you can generate basic interactivity throughout the website. Like other web design environments, 'Dreamweaver' produces the program-code HTML in the background (HTML is short for Hyper Text Markup Language). In essence, this 'language of web-browsers is actually a 'script' that 'draws' & controls the web page being viewed. Layout tag languages like CSS and XML are paired with HTML. As these tag languages are standardised, the streamlined and rather more efficient results perform successfully on a number of different platforms. This means the web page looks the same on Microsoft Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Opera, 'Safari' etc. (or shall we say, that's the plan!) Consequently the graphic blocks you're placing & the text you're putting in is being converted into coding behind the scenes by 'Dreamweaver'. Its essential to have an in-depth understanding of these types of 'languages' in order to be a web-designer at a commercial standard.

Web-developers are members of this group, and they are the most technically apt. As well as a sound grasp of HTML, XML and CSS, web developers will understand other highly regarded programming languages such as 'VB', 'PHP', Java, C# & ASP.net for example. They'll generally also have got a good knowledge of 'SQL' database technology, as this is how most contemporary large websites store their information. A normal E-commerce web-site does not have a bunch of web designers who have developed it's thousands of pages in lay-out form. More often, following the creation of a place-holder 'template', the material will be taken from a database and dynamically inserted. This process makes not only the construction, management & upgrades hugely more straighforward, it also produces a far more consistent site.