If you fancy being a web designer, then you need training in Adobe Dreamweaver. The entire Adobe Web Creative Suite should additionally be learned comprehensively. This will educate you in Action Script and Flash, amongst others, and could lead on to the Adobe Certified Professional or an Adobe Certified Expert accreditation.

The construction of a website is only the beginning of what you'll need - in order to create traffic, maintain its content, and work with dynamic database-driven sites, you will have to learn additional programming skills, like PHP, HTML, and MySQL. You should also gain a practical knowledge of SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) and E-Commerce.

The design environments utilised by web site designers are their most valuable tools. Adobe Creative Suite 4 is the most commercially utilised in the market these days (as of 2010). The software program that builds web-sites is 'Adobe Dreamweaver', & 'Adobe Flash' gives access to 'graphical' content which can be interactive & animated. You could actually say that Dreamweaver is the Word Processor of the Adobe CS range. It will let you lay text and graphics in accordance with specific rules and parameters, & then build basic inter-activity through page linking. As with other web design environments, Dreamweaver produces the program code HTML behind the scenes ('HTML' stands for Hyper Text Markup Language). Basically, this 'language of web browsers' is actually a 'script' which 'draws' and controls the page being looked at. Lay-out tag 'languages' like XML and CSS are matched up with 'HTML'. As these tag 'languages' are standardised, the streamlined and more efficient outcomes perform effectively on many different platforms. This means the web page looks the same on MS Internet Explorer, 'Mozilla Firefox', 'Opera', Safari and so on. (at least, that's the idea!) Consequently the graphic blocks you are placing and the text you're adding is being turned into coding in the background by 'Dreamweaver'. If you are aiming to be a commercially viable website designer, you will have to have an in-depth knowledge of these types of languages.

Web developers are members of this equation, and also the most technically trained. Not only will web-developers understand the languages above, they will also have had training in other languages, such as C#, VB, PHP, 'Java', 'ASP.Net' and so on. Quite a few also have a good knowledge of SQL, the database language - because the information on many large modern web sites is stored in this particular language. Most E-commerce websites aren't the result of a big team of web designers who've built countless web-pages in a lay-out form. What usually happens is a place holder 'template' is produced, and the details are dynamically inserted from the database to the web site. So as well as far better efficiencies with the web site construct, using this method also provides for a more uniform look & 'feel' as well.

Professional web designers can also up-grade their offering if they choose to branch-out into areas such as project-management and e-commerce for example. 'Search Engine Optimisation' ('SEO') is another field that handles how a website is listed with search engines like google - so it may be found more easily (this really is sometimes a whole job by itself.) Also of course, we shouldn't overlook the web-server administrators and installers that work behind the scenes ensuring everything works; although they generally come from a network administration background.

With so much choice, there's no surprise that the majority of career changers get stuck choosing the job they will follow. Since having no solid background in the IT industry, how can most of us be expected to understand what anyone doing a particular job actually does? The key to answering this predicament in the best manner flows from a thorough conversation around several different topics:

* Personalities play an important role - what gets you 'up and running', and what tasks really turn you off.

* What sort of time-frame do you want for retraining?

* Have you thought about salary vs the travel required?

* Many students don't properly consider the energy expected to gain all the necessary accreditation.

* It makes sense to understand what differentiates each area of training.

The bottom line is, the only real way of understanding everything necessary is via an in-depth discussion with an advisor that through years of experience will lead you to the correct decision.

All programs you're considering has to build towards a widely recognised exam at the finale - definitely not some 'in-house' plaque for your wall. Only fully recognised accreditation from the likes of Microsoft, CompTIA, Cisco and Adobe will have any meaning to employers.