Additional skills that are important for commercial web-site designers are a knowledge of project-management & E-commerce. 'Search Engine Optimisation' (SEO) is another area which tackles how the site is indexed with Search Engines - so it may be easily found (this really is almost an entire job in itself.) And of course, we shouldn't forget the web-server administrators and installers who sit behind the scenes making sure the whole thing works properly; though they normally come from a network administration background.

The 'Adobe Creative Suite' is the most commercially popular design-environment utilised by web site designers nowadays. These key applications are now (2010) on Version 4. The software program that builds website pages is Adobe Dreamweaver, & Adobe Flash accesses 'graphical' content material which can be animated and interactive. You might say that 'Dreamweaver' is the Word-Processor of the Adobe CS range. It helps you to lay text & graphics according to particular rules and parameters, and then build basic interactivity via page linking. 'HTML' (Hyper Text Mark-up Language) program coding is created in the background with 'Dreamweaver', much like any web design-environment. In essence, this language of web browsers' is actually a script which 'draws' & controls the web-page being viewed. Alongside HTML are the lay-out 'tag' 'languages' - for instance CSS & XML. Because they are 'standardised', these tag languages will work on multiple platforms to enable more stream-lined 'HTML' coding and more efficient layout techniques. The theory is that the page will look identical on any web browser, whether it's 'Mozilla Firefox', Internet Explorer, 'Safari', 'Opera' or anything else. Subsequently the graphic blocks you're laying & the text you're adding is being converted into coding behind the scenes by 'Dreamweaver'. A well-rounded knowledge of these various 'languages' is essential if you are going to be a commercially viable web designer.

Students who consider this area of study are often very practical, and aren't really suited to the classroom environment, and slogging through piles of books. If this could be you, use multimedia, interactive learning, where learning is video-based. Memory is vastly improved when all our senses are brought into the mix - educational experts have expounded on this for as long as we can remember.

Start a study-program in which you'll receive a library of CD or DVD ROM's - you'll be learning from instructor videos and demo's, and be able to use virtual lab's to practice your new skills. It's very important to see courseware examples from your chosen company. You'll want to see that they include video, demonstrations and various interactive elements.

Many companies provide purely on-line training; and while this is acceptable much of the time, imagine the problems if you lose your internet access or you get intermittent problems and speed issues. It's preferable to have physical CD or DVD discs which don't suffer from these broadband issues.