Surely just about one of the most misunderstood and over-worked titles within the I.T. field these days has to be the words Web Designer? Web-Design incorporates quite a few distinct facets, & an understanding of these may help anybody wanting to get into the market. Web Design incorporates the 'technical' components of a site plus the 'creative' aspects. To the average person on the street, a web-designer is someone who designs the look and feel of a web-site. Meaning a 'web designer' is essentially an 'artist' who has had some technical training. The truth is the modern web-designer's work is an 'inter-related' blend of technical know-how & design creativity - and the two things are becoming quite difficult to split up. If you break down web design into its different roles, then it becomes much more obvious how everything sits together.

Graphic artists should come first - they design and build the icons and pictures for a site. In real terms, graphic-artists usually aren't really web site designers. More usually they are multimedia artists that utilise software like Adobe Photoshop and 'Flash' to create their finished results. Generally, they will have an art background, & may have undertaken studies at college or university level. Plainly, this role calls for a good artistic bias.

Web designers come next - they make use of design software like Dreamweaver to prepare and design the look and feel of the web-site. They work with the actual images which are supplied by the artist, and work with their client to start to develop the 'feel' and navigational composition of the web-site. Many amateur web site designers put emphasis to begin with on the 'format' of the website, as opposed to its function. However, you should essentially begin with a grasp of the functions it needs to perform to construct a truly successful website. This could be a web-based inventory of items, or maybe it's an e-commerce website which requires to be able to sell directly from the web page. Or perhaps it will consist of lots of video & graphics. Then again it may be principally an informational website, where it is important to provide simple entry to relevant pages of text. Regardless of what you require from a web site, it must - at it's most basic level - carry out the function for which it's designed. A lot of websites look fantastic but are a pain to 'navigate' & get where you want - and so people move on & never come back. The purpose of any good web designer is first & foremost to come up with an event that people enjoy and are relaxed with - so that they return again & again.

Supplemental skill-sets which are very useful to commercial web designers are a knowledge of project-management & E-commerce. 'SEO' ('Search Engine Optimisation') know-how is also extremely valuable for web experts - this deals with the skill of getting web sites to or near to the top of the Search Engines for frequently used search phrases. And in the background but vitally important are the web server administrators & installers who make sure that everything works as it should. Officially speaking they are network administrator professionals though.

Web-developers are members of this equation, and also the most technically trained. These people will not only understand HTML, CSS & XML, but will have also trained in more official programming languages like PHP, ASP.net, VB, 'C#', 'Java' and others. And as most modern web-sites of any size 'store' their information using SQL Database technology, they are also likely to have a solid grip SQL also. In reality, it's un-likely that a large e-commerce web-site has been built in layout format by a team of web designers. More often, following the creation of a place-holder template, the details will be taken from a database & dynamically inserted. In addition to being massively more efficient to build, manage & up-date, it also helps with the 'feel' of the website being consistent.

It's important to understand that even the finest web-design programs can only teach you the techniques and processes - none of them can turn you into a bona fide web designer. As you work on your training course, spend some time to construct & develop a large selection of your own websites to create a collection of your work. Your own web sites should be about anything you like - the local music-scene, horses, an author you like or cars. Build an interactive web-site, and begin building traffic towards it. Everything you do will add to your Curriculum Vitae, and present much more to an interviewer than an 'Adobe' certification.

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