Probably one of the most misinterpreted & over-worked expressions within the IT market today has to be the term 'Web Designer'? For anybody thinking of getting into the marketplace, some details of the diverse facets ought to help to make things clear. There are fundamentally 2 elements to web design - the technical side and the creative design side. To the average person on the street, a 'web-designer' is someone who creates the look & 'feel' of a website. Many of us may consider a web-designer a type of artist. But in actuality, within modern day web design it is becoming increasingly difficult to split up the technical part from the creative part, because both of them are so intertwined. It becomes a bit more evident just how things fit together when we split the work up in to it's various roles.

To start with, there are graphic-artists, that design and construct the graphic icons and pictures which we find on a web-site. Most often they accomplish this by making use of graphic layout & animation software (such as Adobe Flash & 'Photoshop'), and are generally not really web-site designers as such. The majority attended further education, typically with a degree level art qualification. Above all else, this specific role calls for a sound creative ability.

Web site designers come next - they employ design-software such as Dreamweaver to create and design the appearance & feel of the web site. They utilise the graphics which are produced by the graphic-artist, & work with the clients to start to create the feel and navigational composition of the web site. A novice web-designer tends to start with the 'form' of the web site, rather than the function. To develop an effective site though, its vital that you first of all look at what you actually need the website to accomplish. It might be a web based inventory of items, or possibly its an E-commerce web site that would need to have the ability to sell directly from the web page. It could be you need to present products via video & a heavily 'graphical' inter-face, or perhaps its mainly an informational website where the requirement is straightforward access to essential text information (like this particular site.) Whatever you require from a web-site, it must - at it's simplest level - fulfil the 'function' for which it is intended. Consumers will abandon a site and not return if its too complicated to 'navigate' - however attractive it looks on the surface. The purpose of any reputable web designer is to first & foremost produce an experience that people enjoy & feel happy with - so that they will come back again and again.

The design-environments utilised by web designers are their most valuable resources. 'Adobe Creative Suite' 4 is the most commercially accepted in the industry these days (as of '10). The software which builds web-sites is 'Adobe Dreamweaver', and 'Adobe Flash' gives access to 'graphical' content which can be interactive & animated. In a great many ways we might see 'Dreamweaver' as a rather fancy Word Processor. Text & graphics can be displayed (within known parameters) and then a basic interactivity can be created through page linking. Like other web design-environments, Dreamweaver produces the program code 'HTML' in the background (HTML is short for Hyper Text Markup Language). It's the language of web browsers, and is a 'script' which basically draws & controls the web-page you are seeing. Paired with HTML are the lay-out 'tag' 'languages' like XML & CSS. Because these 'tag' 'languages' are standardised, the smoother & more efficient outcomes perform successfully on many different platforms. The theory being that the web-page will look exactly the same on any web browser, be it 'Mozilla Firefox', Internet Explorer, Safari, 'Opera' or whichever. So although you place the graphic-blocks and put in the textual content, Dreamweaver is turning this into code in the background. A thorough knowledge of these types of languages is critical if you are going to be a commercially viable web designer.

Web-developers are members of this group, and also the most technically minded. Along with an understanding of 'HTML', 'XML' and CSS, web developers will understand other highly regarded programming-languages such as VB, 'PHP', Java, 'C#' and 'ASP.Net' for example. And as most modern sites of any size 'store' their information using 'SQL' database-technology, they are also likely to have a firm grip on this as well. In reality, it's not likely that a large e-commerce web site has been created in lay-out form by a team of web designers. More commonly, after the construction of a place holder template, the material will be taken from a Database & 'dynamically' inserted. This not only makes the construction, management and enhancements hugely more efficient, it also makes for a more consistent website.

Commercial web designers can also up-grade their offering if they choose to branch-out in to areas such as project management & E-commerce for instance. Another area - which is not to be underestimated - is SEO ('Search Engine Optimisation'). This is focused on how to optimise website listings on search engines like 'Google' and Yahoo. And even though they typically come from a network-administration background, we mustn't forget the incredibly valuable job of the web server installers and administrators, who keep everything working in the background.

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