Just getting started in Web design? Or perhaps you're having trouble keeping your skills up to date. It's no wonder: In the fast-moving world of Web design, technologies go out of favor faster than you can say "flash." We've asked around to find out what technologies you need to know now and which ones will become invaluable in the future.

First, we'd be remiss if we didn't mention the obvious: Get to know HTML. Without it, the Web as we know it wouldn't exist. Some design firms

Helpful Resources Popular Web Design Books Designing Web Usability by Jakob Nielson Web Design Essentials by Giudice and Dennis Designing Web Graphics 3 by Lynda Weinman Photoshop 5.5/imagready H.O.T (Hands on Training) for the Web by Lynda Weinman The Photoshop 5.0/5.5 Wow! Book by Dayton and Davis Dreamweaver 3 Hands-on Training by Lynda Weinman Real World Adobe GoLive 4.0 by Carlson and Fleishman Reference Sites & Tutorials CNET.com HTMLGoodies.com, Builder.com Macromedia University Hotwired Webmonkey Online Training SmartPlanet.com: Offers instructor-led Photoshop, Illustrator, and Introduction to Web Design courses for $19.95 (with membership) Hungryminds.com: Offers a variety of industrutor-led courses, instructional books, and multimedia instruction.

use HTML editors such as Dreamweaver and Homesite, while others stick to straight HTML coding. To be on the safe side, learn both. If you don't know HTML, learning the other technologies that will add interactivity and interest to your site won't be worth much. It's sort of like trying to make a soufflé before you've learned how to boil an egg.

Dream Tools
Some designers consider Macromedia Dreamweaver a godsend, while other would rather code in straight HTML. It really depends on whom you talk to. However, from our informal survey, Dreamweaver seems to be as popular as ever with design divas.

"Before Dreamweaver came along in 1998, Web designers were much more
closely married to code and even a small-scale site with only a few
Web pages was difficult and slow to manage," says Sara Cormeny of PaperLantern.com.

According to Cormeny, Dreamweaver's innovation has made it a staple for creative Web designers -- despite some buggy performance -- for several reasons. First, it offers intelligent WYSIWYG ("what you see is what you get") editing that produces clean HTML code. You can also create templates that mean a small change can be quickly propagated throughout a Web site. And last, it provides basic site management that allows a designer better understanding and control over the relative location of files.

Joshua Rasiel is a Web designer at On-Line Design in Rye, NY, where he's been since July of 1999. His top three picks for Web graphics programs are Adobe ImageReady (with Photoshop 5.5), Adobe Photoshop, and Flash. "Anyone interested in any form of graphics as a career should learn Photoshop as extensively as possible," he advises.

Keep in mind that Photoshop was originally developed for print design, so it has some limitations as a Web tool. For example, it didn't initially support things a Web graphics program needs," explains Rasiel. "In an effort to develop something more Web friendly, Adobe created ImageReady. It uses the same engine as Photoshop and most of the same tools, but is meant for the Web. In addition to those tools, Rasiel also uses Adobe GoLive, which is a Web-building program. As most designers will agree, it may take weeks to learn Photoshop, but years to master.

"I could not live without DreamWeaver and ImageReady -- the absolute basics to create good-looking HTML pages with good-looking graphics," emphasizes Cormeny. She also says she'd be "crestfallen" if she had to give up Macromedia Fireworks, a Web graphics production program that she uses to mock-up pages for her clients and to optimize Illustrator-created graphics.

According to Web designer Eve Simon from Eden Studios in Washington, D.C., here's how most professionals use these tools:

• The whole Web page is mocked up in Photoshop first. While ImageReady has many of the same tools, nothing beats Photoshop for page layout and design, not to mention image manipulation. Some elements may be created in Adobe Illustrator as well, which is a vector-based drawing program that creates clean lines and smooth curves that can be sized without a loss of quality. Those elements are brought into Photoshop to complete the whole mockup.

• When its all ready to go, there is a "jump to ImageReady" command which opens the same file in ImageReady, layers, effects and all. From here, you can slice the page into manageable chunks, and create the rollover or animations. Again - for a mockup. Then you can take each slice and optimize them individually (so if you have a page with chunks of solid color and sections of full color photo, you can optimize each for the best resolution and the fastest possible load time).

• Finally, you can output the sliced page (with all the effects) as an HTML page. Ultimately, most people use this as a comping tool (a mockup tool that gives you a sense of how a design is going tolook. ), and then developers take it from there to build the actual html pages in real code.

• You can also create individual images for navigation buttons, etc, using these programs, but the real design power comes from the tools that allow you to take an entire design concept mockup and turn it into a functional test page.

Now that you know the tools of the trade, where and how can you learn to use them? "The best way to go about learning how to use design applications is to go to school, either at an art school, or to take individual courses on whatever
program you want to learn," advises Daniel Azoulay, President and COO of Waxdigital. "Of course, you can always teach yourself; there are several books available that teach graphics applications -- they usually come with CD-ROMs, to help a person learn design applications as they sit at their computer."