Dreamweaver Training Courses - Adobe Web Design Careers

An Adobe Dreamweaver course will teach you how to use the industry-standard professional tools for creating innovative website designs. With Dreamweaver training you can learn how to deliver your ideas onto web pages and mobile media - it's the definitive tool for creative expression.

Adobe CS4 is now standard, so be sure to train in this latest version. But any creative web design student would be selling themselves short if they limited themselves purely to Dreamweaver training though. Along with Dreamweaver skills, professional designers will be expected to have proficient skills in Flash, to create animations and bring a site to life.

These two commanding design tools will help you to create stunning dynamic web pages - Dreamweaver for building great-looking and easy to maintain pages, and Flash for an extra dimension of interactivity, design animation and amazing special effects.

These exciting skills can lead to becoming an Adobe Certified Expert (A.C.E.) or an Adobe Certified Professional (A.C.P.).

Such Adobe certifications will ensure you get short-listed for the interview when it's time to go into industry.

However, web design is a very subjective skill, and once you've got to the interview you'll need to show what you can do. So it's vital to prepare a portfolio of your designs to present to your prospective employer. You'll need several 'show-case' websites on-line.

To become commercially viable, today's market demands that web professionals have very well-rounded skills, and building the website is just the start.

Your Dreamweaver course should also extend to a full tutorial in HTML & CSS. These are the underlying languages and layout descriptions which Dreamweaver creates in the background for you. But without a keen knowledge of how the created code works, you'll be very restricted if you need to get in and debug or streamline your sites.

The next step would be to cover extended and dynamic HTML and PHP programming, as these will allow you to start getting to grips with dynamic websites - which is essential for professional work. Modern sites use server-side scripts and programs to make decisions or look-up data before it is sent to your browser. Without this type of functionality, all database driven sales sites like Amazon.com could not function.

In fact, if you need your site to be anything more than a simple online catalogue or brochure, then dynamic coding is paramount to create that interactivity with the user. It may be worthwhile to quickly define the difference between a browser and a search engine at this point - as there is a lot of confusion in this area...

Google & You Tube recently did a survey and found that less than 5% of people knew the difference - so you're definitely not alone!

A Browser is quite simply a piece of computer software that interprets web-page code. i.e. it displays web-pages according to the languages they are created in (and there are lots of languages!) It is a fairly 'dumb' display tool and most of the fancy decisions and data look-ups are done at the web server, before the page is sent out to you to be displayed. Without a browser you couldn't look at web-pages. The most popular browsers are Microsoft Internet Explorer (the blue swirly 'e'), Mozilla Firefox, Safari, Opera & Google Chrome.

A Search Engine is a dynamic website that holds a huge index of all the web-pages that it thinks are worth listing. It's kind of like the index at the back of a reference book. The bigger the book, the longer it would take to find what you wanted if you just had to flip through.

It's estimated that Google, for example, indexes over 50 billion sites now - just imagine trying to find what you want in that lot! So Google uses some very fancy algorithms (and according to recent publications, the most powerful computer on Earth,) to pull out a list of what you want according to the keywords that you type in, and in order of importance or relevance.

Of course, this importance and relevance is somewhat subjective, which is why we often have to go through 3 or 4 pages to find what we really want. But you get the idea. Google is essentially 'just' a website that indexes an awful lot of other websites.

Following on from this, you'll need to know how to handle e-commerce sites, and perhaps the most important but often overlooked requirement is an understanding of Search Engine Optimisation. With over a billion people online in the world today, the internet is a busy place! Many new websites fail because they get lost in the crowd, so learning how to optimise your websites to feature well on the major search engines is highly critical.

People with web design knowledge will often go on to become full Web Developers. This generally involves taking a professional programming qualification such as the Microsoft MCPD (Microsoft Certified Professional Developer).

Where web designers concentrate on all the visual aspects of a site (the pretty bit at the front!), web developers create the more involved software that enables an e-commerce site to function, i.e. the program code for the 'back-office'. This might check product availability when an order is placed. It could also check weight and delivery details, raise an invoice and update the sales ledger.

The coding will also control the financial transaction, ensuring secure encryption details etc. This is only a tiny example, but the code that actually makes a professional site do what it's supposed to do is handled by the developer.

So whether your interest lies ultimately on the developer side of web design, or very much on the creative side, a comprehensive and worthwhile Dreamweaver course should be about much more than Dreamweaver training alone. Read on to investigate the individual training routes...