Workshop days can be offered as a big positive benefit by a lot of trainers. If you talk to many computer industry trainees who've attended a few, you'll likely realise that they've now become a waste of time because of many things:

- The amount of travel required - many trips and quite often hundreds of miles a time.

- If you're working, then Monday to Friday events are hard to attend. Typically you are having to deal with two or three days together to make it worse.

- And don't overlook the lost vacation days. Most of us have four weeks vacation allowance. If half is given up to classes, then we aren't going to be doing much vacationing.

- Workshops sometimes reach their maximum intake very quickly, leaving us with a less-than-ideal slot.

- A lot of students want to progress quickly, while others are looking to take a more 'steady' pace and not be forced to adopt an uncomfortable speed for them. This brings tension in most cases.

- The cost of travel - travelling to and from the training college and of course several days bed and breakfast can really add up every time you have to go. If we just assume five to ten workshops costing 35 pounds for one night's accommodation, plus 40 pounds for petrol and 15 pounds for food, we find an extra four to nine hundred pounds of hidden costs on top.

- Most attendees want their training to remain private so as to avoid any repercussions from their current employer.

- It's very common for people not to put a question forward that they would like answered - purely down to the fact that they're surrounded by fellow attendees.

- For those who have work away from home, it's a fact of life that workshops can become impossible to get to - and yet, they've been paid for in advance.

Doesn't it make so much more sense to be taught at a time that's convenient for you - not the school - and utilise virtual lab environments with videos of your instructors. Study can happen anywhere that suits. Got a laptop?... Then you could get a bit of sun outside as you study. If any problem raises its head then get onto the live 24x7 support. Forget taking notes - all the lessons are prepared and laid out for you - ready to go. If you need to cover something again, it's all right there. Though this won't avoid every single problem, it surely vastly reduces stress and simplifies things. Plus you've got less travel, hassle and costs.

The most important tools employed by web-site designers are their design environments, with Adobe Creative Suite (now in Version 4 as of '09/10) being essentially the most commercially popular. 'Dreamweaver' is the software that builds web sites, with Flash providing access to animated and interactive graphical content material. You could say that 'Dreamweaver' is the Word-Processor of the Adobe CS series. It enables you to lay text and graphics in accordance with certain parameters & rules, & then produce basic inter-activity through page linking. As with other web design-environments, 'Dreamweaver' creates 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' & controls the page being viewed. Along with 'HTML' are the layout tag languages - for instance XML and CSS. These tag languages enable more streamlined 'HTML' coding and more efficient lay-out techniques, which will work on multiple platforms (as they're 'standardised'). And so no matter which internet browser a person uses, ('Internet Explorer', Firefox, 'Opera' and so on.) the page will ideally look the same. So although you place the graphic blocks and add the textual content, 'Dreamweaver' is turning this into coding behind the scenes. If you are going to be a commercially feasible website designer, you'll have to have a thorough understanding of these types of languages.

Commercial web-site designers may also up-grade their offering if they branch out in to fields like project-management & e-commerce for instance. Another discipline - that is not to be under-estimated - is 'SEO' ('Search Engine Optimisation'). This concerns how to optimize website indexation on search engines like 'Google' and Yahoo. And of course, we mustn't forget the web-server administrators and installers that work behind the scenes ensuring the whole thing functions as it should; although they generally come from a network administration background.

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