If you're thinking of a web design career, you will need to study Adobe Dreamweaver. In order to take advantage of Dreamweaver professionally as a web designer, an in-depth understanding of the entire Adobe Web Creative Suite (including Flash and Action Script) is something to consider very seriously. With these skills, you can go onto become either an Adobe Certified Expert or Adobe Certified Professional (ACE or ACP).

Creating the website is just the start of the skills needed though - to drive traffic to the site, maintain its content, and work on dynamic sites that are database driven, you'll be required to have further programming skills, namely ones like HTML and PHP, and database engines like MySQL. You should also develop an excellent grasp of E-Commerce and SEO (Search Engine Optimisation).

The design environments utilised by web-site designers are their most valuable tools. 'Adobe Creative Suite' 4 is the most commercially popular in the industry right now (as of 2010). 'Dreamweaver' is the software program that builds web sites, with 'Flash' delivering access to animated and interactive 'graphical' content material. You might say that 'Dreamweaver' is the Word-Processor of the Adobe Creative Suite range. Graphics & text can be displayed (within certain limits) and then a basic interactivity can be produced by page linking. Dreamweaver (or any other web-design environment) creates HTML (Hyper-Text-Markup-Language) program code in the background. Basically, this language of web browsers' is a script that draws and controls the page being looked at. Layout tag 'languages' like CSS & XML are matched up with 'HTML'. Because these 'tag' 'languages' are 'standardised', the smoother and more efficient results work successfully on a number of different platforms. What this means is the web-page looks the same on MS 'Internet Explorer', 'Mozilla Firefox', Opera, 'Safari' and so on. (or shall we say, that's the plan!) So although you are laying graphic blocks and adding text, in the background, Dreamweaver is turning this into 'code'. It's important to gain an in-depth understanding of these various languages if you would like be a website designer at a commercial level.

Web-developers are essentially the most technically trained of all. These people won't only understand HTML, CSS & 'XML', but they will have studied more official programming-languages like 'PHP', ASP.net, Visual Basic, C#, 'Java' etc. And because most modern web-sites of any kind of size store their information using 'SQL' database-technology, they're also likely to have got a solid handle on this also. Most e-commerce websites aren't the result of a big bunch of web-designers who have constructed countless web pages in a layout form. More often, after the formation of a place holder template, the material will be taken from a Database & dynamically inserted. This process not only makes the construction, management & up-dates hugely more straighforward, it also tends to make a far more consistent web site.

Students often end up having issues because of a single training area very rarely considered: The method used to 'segment' the courseware before being couriered to your address. Often, you will join a program taking 1-3 years and get posted one section at a time - from one exam to the next. It seems to make sense on one level, but consider these issues: What could you expect if you didn't actually complete each and every exam within the time limits imposed? Often the prescribed exam order doesn't work as well as an alternative path could be.

Ideally, you'd get ALL the training materials right at the beginning - so you'll have them all for the future to come back to - irrespective of any schedule. You can also vary the order in which you complete your exams where a more intuitive path can be found.

One fatal mistake that potential students often succumb to is to look for the actual course to take, instead of focusing on the desired end-result. Universities are full of students that chose a program because it looked interesting - instead of the program that would surely get them their end-goal of a job they enjoyed. It's possible, in many cases, to find immense satisfaction in a year of study only to end up putting 20 long years into a career that does nothing for you, simply because you did it without some quality research at the outset.

Make sure you investigate your leanings around earning potential and career progression, plus your level of ambition. You should understand what (if any) sacrifices you'll need to make for a particular role, what exams are required and how to develop your experience. Talk to an experienced advisor who knows about the sector you're looking at, and could provide detailed descriptions of what you actually do in that role. Getting all these things right long before starting out on a training program makes a lot of sense, doesn't it?