It is reasonable to say that one of the more broadly interpreted & badly understood terms in IT is the label Web-Designer. For anybody looking to get in to the market, an explanation about the distinct aspects might help to make things clear. You'll find there are essentially 2 elements to web-design - the technical side and the 'creative' design side. Lots of people think a web designer is somebody who designs the visible aspects of the site. A lot of people might consider a 'web-designer' a sort of 'artist'. In fact the modern web designer's occupation is an inter-related combination of technical understanding and design-creativity - and the two things are becoming quite difficult to split up. When you break down web-design into it's different roles, then it will become more obvious how everything fits together.

Graphic artists come 1st - these people design & construct the symbols & pictures for a site. Most are not strictly web-site designers as such, & in many cases are multimedia artists employing graphic lay-out & animation software, (like Adobe 'Photoshop' and Adobe Flash.) Virtually all graphic artists attended university, and have a background in art & design. This element is much more about a creative artistic expertise than any other function.

Site designers are next - they utilise design-software like Adobe 'Dreamweaver' to prepare and design the 'look' & 'feel' of the site. They take the visuals done by the graphic-artist, & along with their client produce an emerging style & 'navigational' composition for the brand-new site. An amateur web designer often starts with the 'form' of the web-site, rather than the 'function'. In order to build a successful internet site though, its important to first look at what you really need the website to do. Is it mainly an e-commerce web site, that needs to have the ability to receive payments safely and securely, or is it a web-based product catalogue listing? Perhaps somewhat like this website the primary purpose is straightforward access to pertinent details, or it could be it will be a showcase for products via video & a heavily graphical interface. No matter what you need from a site, it must - at it's simplest level - fulfil the function for which it's designed. There is no value in building a visually inspiring web-site that's impossible for people to get to where they want! A professional web designer must basically develop a web-based 'experience' that's both pleasant & instinctive for those coming to the website - then they'll come back again and again.

The most technically-trained web professionals are generally the web developers. In addition to a sound grasp of 'HTML', 'XML' and 'CSS', web developers will understand other highly regarded programming-languages such as Visual Basic, 'PHP', Java, C# and ASP.Net for example. Quite a few also have got an effective understanding of SQL, the database-language - since the data on most sizable modern web sites is stored in this particular language. In reality, its unlikely that a large E-commerce website has been built in layout form by a team of web-designers. Instead, a place holder template will have been developed, and the material will be dynamically loaded from a database. So along with much better efficiencies with the website build, this process also allows for a more consistent look and 'feel' as well.

The key resources used by web-site designers are their design environments, with Adobe Creative Suite (currently in Version 4 as of 2009/2010) staying the most popular commercially. Whilst Adobe Flash provides access to interactive & animated 'graphical' content material, 'Dreamweaver' is the software program that builds web sites. Dreamweaver could be considered a 'glorified' Word-Processor in many ways. Within particular rules & parameters, it allows you to display graphics & text, & then via a procedure called page linking you can generate basic interactivity inside the website. Just like other web design environments, Dreamweaver creates the program-code 'HTML' behind the scenes ('HTML' stands for Hyper Text Markup Language). Essentially, this 'language of web browsers' is actually a script that 'draws' and controls the page being looked at. Along with HTML are the layout 'tag' 'languages' - like XML and CSS. Because these 'tag' 'languages' are 'standardised', the streamlined & rather more efficient results function effectively on a number of different platforms. The theory being that the web-page will look exactly the same on any browser, be it 'Mozilla Firefox', Internet Explorer, 'Safari', Opera or whatever. So even though you lay the graphic blocks & add the text, 'Dreamweaver' is turning this into coding behind the scenes. Its essential to gain a thorough comprehension of these types of languages if you wish to be a web-designer at the commercial standard.

Further skills that are very useful to professional web designers are an understanding of project management & E-commerce. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is another field that deals with how a web site is indexed with search engines - to ensure that it can be found more easily (this is sometimes a whole job by itself.) And behind the scenes but vitally important we have the web-server installers & administrators that ensure that the whole thing operates smoothly. Technically these people are network-administrator specialists though.

Microsoft MCSA - MCSE Online Career PC Training Courses >>