What are the duties and responsibilites of a web designer

Essentially a web designer works with an individual or company to put together a website. Typically the process starts with sitting down and laying out what kind of website is desired, doing a draw up and getting it approved, and then moving on to actually develop the website.

From there the client just needs a domain name and hosting and they have a live website.

It depends on the size of company but in many cases you will use Photoshop or something similar to do a template and then you will be expected to know HTML, CSS, JavaScript, JQuery, Ruby on Rails, AJAX, JSP, .NET, or some combination of these to develop websites.

If you are looking for some website design guidelines take a read through the Graphics Online article added as a related link.