For almost all web designers, Adobe Dreamweaver is the starting point of study. It is probably the favourite environment for web development on the planet. The full Adobe Web Creative Suite ought also to be studied in its entirety. This will introduce you to Action Script and Flash, (and more), and will prepare you for the Adobe Certified Professional or an Adobe Certified Expert qualification.

The most important resources employed by web designers are their design environments, with Adobe Creative Suite (currently in version 4 as of 2009/2010) being essentially the most popular commercially. Whilst Adobe Flash offers access to animated & interactive graphical content material, Dreamweaver is the software program that builds sites. In many ways we may view 'Dreamweaver' as a rather fancy Word Processor. Text and graphics can be placed (according to certain limitations) and then a basic inter-activity can be created by means of page-linking. Like other web design-environments, Dreamweaver creates the program-code 'HTML' in the background ('HTML' is short for Hyper Text Markup Language). This is the 'language' of web browsers, & is a 'script' which in essence draws and controls the web-page you are seeing. Layout 'tag' 'languages' like CSS and XML are paired with 'HTML'. Because these tag languages are 'standardised', the smoother and more efficient results work effectively on many different platforms. This means the web-page will look exactly the same on MS 'Internet Explorer', 'Mozilla Firefox', 'Opera', 'Safari' etc. (or shall we say, that's the idea!) Consequently although you're laying graphic-blocks & adding text, in the background, Dreamweaver is converting what you're doing into code. It's very important to have an in-depth comprehension of these various 'languages' to be able to be a web designer at a commercial standard.

The most technically trained web experts are normally the web developers. These people will not only know HTML, 'CSS' and XML, but will have also trained in more official programming languages such as PHP, 'ASP.Net', Visual Basic, C#, 'Java' etc. They will generally also have a solid knowledge of 'SQL' Database technology, since this is how most modern large web sites store their information. A regular e-commerce site doesn't have a bunch of web designers who've developed it's many hundreds of pages in layout format. More usually, after the formation of a place holder template, the details will be taken from a database & dynamically inserted. So as well as much larger efficiency with the web site build, this process also allows for an infinitely more uniform look & feel as well.

Some other skill sets that are highly relevant to web designers in the commercial market are a good grasp of e-commerce & project management. 'SEO' (Search Engine Optimisation) know-how is extremely useful for web experts - this deals with the art of getting internet sites to or near to the top of the search engines for frequently used search terms. And behind the scenes but hugely important we have the web-server administrators & installers who ensure that the whole thing works efficiently. Technically these people are network administrator specialists though.

We're often asked why traditional academic studies are less in demand than the more commercial certificates? Vendor-based training (to use industry-speak) is more effective in the commercial field. Industry has acknowledged that a specialist skill-set is essential to cope with a technologically complex workplace. Microsoft, CompTIA, CISCO and Adobe dominate in this arena. In essence, only required knowledge is taught. It's slightly more broad than that, but the most important function is always to concentrate on the fundamentally important skill-sets (with some necessary background) - without attempting to cover a bit about every other area - in the way that academic establishments often do.

What if you were an employer - and your company needed a person with some very particular skills. What is easier: Trawl through reams of different degrees and college qualifications from several applicants, struggling to grasp what they've learned and which trade skills they have, or choose a specific set of accreditations that specifically match what you're looking for, and then select who you want to interview from that. You'll then be able to concentrate on getting a feel for the person at interview - instead of long discussions on technical suitability.