Its reasonable to state that perhaps one of the more broadly interpreted & poorly defined definitions in IT is the label Web-Designer. In truth, web design does contain a number of distinctive areas, & so it might help to clarify things a little if we break it down. Web-Design incorporates the 'technical' components of a site along with the creative elements. The typical laptop or computer user considers web-designers are responsible for how a web-site looks & 'feels'. In other words, they look at web designers because 'artists' on the whole. In reality every web designer's career is an 'inter-related' mix of 'technical' know-how & design-creativity - & the two have become very difficult to separate. When you break down web design in to its different functions, then it becomes much more evident how everything sits together.

First, there are the graphic artists, that design & assemble the graphic icons and images that we find on any website. In real terms, graphic artists are not really web-site designers. More usually they are multimedia artists that work with software like Adobe Photoshop and 'Flash' to produce their results. Typically, they will have come from an artistic background, and could have undertaken studies at college or university level. Evidently, this particular job involves a keen artistic bias.

Second of all, there are the web site designers, who use design-environments like Adobe Dreamweaver to set-up the layout and 'feel' of the web page. By employing graphics from the graphic-artist, they will create the 'navigational' framework of the website, keeping in touch with the client to ensure the 'feel' meets their needs. An amateur web designer often starts with the form of the site, instead of the 'function'. If you want to develop a good internet site however, it is vital that you first of all look at what you actually would like the site to do. Perhaps it's actually an online inventory, or an e-commerce website where products are available there and then. Maybe you want to highlight items by way of video & a heavily graphical interface, or maybe it is mainly an informational web-site where the necessity is straightforward access to essential text data (such as this particular website.) Whatever you require from a site, it must - at it's most basic level - fulfil the 'function' for which it is intended. There's little point making a visually appealing website that is hopeless for anyone to get to where they want! The aim of any good web-designer is to first and foremost construct an event that people enjoy and are happy with - so that they return again.

The most technically-trained internet professionals are generally the web-developers. They will not just know 'HTML', 'CSS' & XML, but will have learnt 'proper' programming-languages such as 'PHP', 'ASP.Net', VB, 'C#', Java and the like. Quite a few also have an effective knowledge of SQL, the database language - since the data on many large modern websites is stored in this 'language'. In reality, its not likely that a big e-commerce website has been created in lay-out format by a bunch of web-designers. What normally occurs is a place-holder 'template' is developed, & the details are dynamically inserted from the database to the web site. So along with much larger efficiencies with the website construct, this process also allows for a more consistent look & feel as well.

The design-environments employed by web-designers are their most valuable tools. 'Adobe Creative Suite' 4 is the most commercially popular in the industry nowadays (as of 2010). Whilst Adobe Flash gives access to interactive & animated 'graphical' content, Dreamweaver is the software which builds sites. In some ways we can view 'Dreamweaver' as a glorified Word Processor. It will let you place text and graphics in accordance with certain parameters & rules, & then build basic interactivity via page-linking. 'HTML' (Hyper Text Mark-up Language) program code is created in the background with 'Dreamweaver', just like any web design-environment. HTML is a script which basically draws & controls the web-page on your monitor. Its the 'language' of web browsers. Along with HTML are the lay-out 'tag' 'languages' - like XML and CSS. These tag languages enable more stream-lined 'HTML' coding & more effective layout methods, which will work on multiple-platforms (as they're 'standardised'). The theory being that the web page will look identical on any internet browser, be it 'Mozilla Firefox', Internet Explorer, Safari, 'Opera' or anything else. As a result the graphic blocks you are laying and the text you are including is being converted into code in the background by Dreamweaver. A well-rounded understanding of these types of 'languages' is critical if you're going to be a commercially viable website designer.

Obviously there are cross overs with a lot of these functions - we ourselves have contacts with several web-designers who're skilled in many of them. It will take time however to acquire such an array of professional skillsets. You have to be taught several things on a commercially feasible web design training package: First of all, an introduction to basic web-design, followed on by training in Adobe 'Dreamweaver' & a synopsis of the primary components of Adobe 'Flash'. This would then move onto a comprehension of 'HTML' & 'CSS', with vital insights into the area of e-commerce. To construct 'dynamic' web-sites it's important to gain knowledge of PHP, which is a simpler programming-language to get into than ASP.NET. You also need a rudimentary knowledge of databases & SEO. The reason why you require each of these elements is they will give you the technical grounding to work on a variety of website builds. Similar to when you were learning to drive, you have to first develop the actual physical skills, before you effectively push beyond them and gain an element of 'finesse'. A comprehensive training-program like this would possibly involve close to 400-500 hrs of part-time study & practice & therefore can be successfully accomplished part time over a year. Careful preparation to get the right training course for you is a good investment in your future - skilled career experts can help you sort the best way forward before you get going.

The most important thing to stress is that the training program itself will not make you a web designer; it will merely provide you with the methods. Put together as many websites as you can whilst you work through your studies - the exercise will be invaluable & you'll have something to show just what you can do. Create websites about a hobby, your pet, a favourite music group or TV programme. Construct an inter-active web-site, & start generating 'traffic' towards it. Adobe certifications are of help, but how you can use the knowledge says a lot more about you as a web designer!

Professional web designers can also up-grade their offering if they choose to branch-out in to fields like project management & E-commerce for instance. Another area - that isn't to be under-estimated - is SEO ('Search Engine Optimisation'). This concerns how to optimise website indexation on search engines like Google and 'Yahoo'. Also of course, we shouldn't overlook the web server installers & administrators who work behind the scenes making sure the whole thing functions as it should; although they typically come from a network administration background.

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