Its reasonable to say that perhaps one of the more widely interpreted and improperly understood definitions in IT is the label 'Web Designer'. Web Design includes a number of distinct facets, and a good understanding of these facets may help anyone considering getting in the industry. Web Design incorporates the 'technical' elements of a successful site plus the 'creative' aspects. Lots of people presume a 'web-designer' is someone who is in charge of the visible areas of the site. To put it differently, they look at web-designers as artists in the main. Having said that, a professional 'web designer' will in fact be as involved with the technical element of things as much as the 'creative' element. When you break down web design in to it's various functions, then it will become more obvious how each thing sits together.

Individuals that design and put together the pictures & graphic symbols which go on a website are called graphic-artists. Most are not really site designers per-se, and more often than not are multimedia artists utilising graphic lay-out & animation software, (for instance Adobe Photoshop & Adobe 'Flash'.) Generally, they'll have come from an artistic background, & might have undertaken studies at university or college level. Clearly, this particular job demands a solid artistic flair.

Then we have the web designers, who generate the lay-out & overall feel of a web-site by using a design environment such as Dreamweaver. They use the work created by the graphic artist, and along with their clients develop an emerging style and navigational composition for the brand-new web page. A web-designer with fairly limited knowledge may very well focus on the form instead of the function of a site. However, to actually create a valuable website, you need to start with a clear understanding of what you need the website to really do. It may be an on-line inventory of products and services, or maybe its an e-commerce website which requires to be able to sell straight from the site. Or perhaps it'll have lots of video and heavy graphics. On the other hand it could be predominantly an info site, where it is essential to provide easy access to appropriate web-pages of copy. Essentially the web site must have the capacity to meet it's required needs - whatever those particular requirements are. There is little point designing a visually inspiring web site that is too hard for people to navigate! The aim of any good web-designer is first & foremost to build an event that individuals enjoy and are relaxed with - so that they will come back again & again.

The 'Adobe Creative Suite' is the most commercially popular design environment used by web site designers today. These vital applications are currently ('10) on Version 4. Whilst 'Adobe Flash' offers access to animated and interactive 'graphical' content, 'Dreamweaver' is the software which builds websites. You might state that 'Dreamweaver' is the Word Processor of the Adobe Creative Suite range. In accordance with certain rules & constraints, it helps you place graphics & text, and then through a procedure called page-linking you can generate basic inter-activity within the website. HTML (Hyper Text Mark-up Language) program-coding is produced in the background with Dreamweaver, much like any other web design environment. Effectively, this 'language of web-browsers is actually a script which 'draws' & controls the web page being looked at. Alongside HTML are the lay-out tag 'languages' - like XML and CSS. Because they are 'standardised', these can work on multiple-platforms to enable more streamlined 'HTML' code and more efficient layout techniques. This means the web-page will look the same on Microsoft Internet Explorer, 'Mozilla Firefox', Opera, 'Safari' and so on. (or shall we say, that's the idea!) So although you lay the graphic blocks and add the textual content, 'Dreamweaver' is converting this in to coding behind the scenes. A well-rounded knowledge of these 'languages' is critical if you're to become a commercially-viable web-designer.

The most technically-trained web professionals are often the web developers. As well as a sound grasp of HTML, 'XML' and CSS, web-developers will understand other 'proper' programming-languages like VB, PHP, 'Java', C# & 'ASP.Net' etc. And since most contemporary web-sites of any kind of size 'store' their data using SQL database-technology, they're likely to have a solid grip SQL as well. A normal E-commerce site does not have a group of web-designers who've created its thousands of web-pages in layout format. What usually occurs is a place-holder template is produced, and the details are dynamically inserted from a database to the site. This process not only makes the building, management & up-dates vastly more straighforward, it equally produces a far more consistent site.

Supplemental skillsets which are very useful for commercial web-designers are an understanding of project-management & E-commerce. Another area - that is not to be underestimated - is 'SEO' ('Search Engine Optimisation'). This concerns how to optimise site listings on Search Engines like 'Google' and 'Yahoo'. And of course, we mustn't forget the web server installers and administrators who work behind the scenes making sure everything works properly; although they typically originate from a network administration background.

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