Web site design software

[THREEL]

Evening everyone,

Does anyone have advice on web site design software? I've heard of a few, but I've never used any. What's in your wallet? Sorry, wrong commercial! I mean, what are you using to design your web sites?

tHREEL, but you can call me AL.

[jameswillmott]

I use a text editor. :)

[shrox]

I still use good old Netscape Composer, and I only have that because I found an old disc at work. It is a WYSIWYG (kind of). That and Notepad.

[art]

I also use plain text editor, but Adobe Dreamweaver seems to be a popular choice for many people.

[Stooch]

dreamweaver and flash FTW.

[RollerJesus]

Layout in Photoshop, then text editor.

[Tom Wood]

WordPress at the moment.

[shrox]

I often use Lightwave for some elements in a webpage.

[inquisitive]

dreamweaver and notepad, although dreamweaver may have a steep learning curve (or not).

[richgrafx]

Eclipse gives you a good base to add plugins to give you the functionality you need based on if you are including php, java, javascript, as well as plsql if you are also making use of transactions to a database...

You can use Eclipse as your core ide for doing anything from html to c++

[Red_Oddity]

Flash, and the PortableApps version of Notepad++ and Xampp.

Also, looking into Flex at the moment because it easily ports to Air.

[THREEL]

What, no Front Page?

Using a text editor requires knowledge of html and/or the like doesn't it?

I really don't know html, or c++. I'm hoping there's something more visually driven, since I'm more of a visual learner.

AL

[hrgiger]

Do they still make and support Front Page? I used that a long time ago, I got it free with a software bundle I got in school.
If you want a purely visual design environment, a program like dreamweaver will do you just fine. If you don't want anything overly complex, often your web hosting provider will have site builder tools you can use which are pretty straightforward, they usually offer a lot of canned templates that you can customize to varying degrees.
Often, a lot of web designers will mock up the look of their site in a program like photoshop and then use dreamwaver or fireworks to slice it up and place it into the layout in dreamweaver or the like. Or you can just make it directly within dreamwaver. There are plenty of free editors out there, but If you have the money, I would probably go for a program like dreamweaver because that is a ton of learning material out there for it.

[jdomingo]

try web page maker........under 50 bucks and it's easy to learn.......i did my website from this program.............

[Tom Wood]

The problem I found with Dreamweaver 8 is that is promises design view designing, but you still end up working mostly in code view to get it right. Which is fine once you get used to working in code. But then it becomes something of an overkill. The CSS editor is nice once you figure out how to use it. I use Dreamweaver now mostly to manage the files on an entire site since it keeps up with the site structure. When not at my production machine I use Winsyntax for HTML editing. Free, color coded.

[DelendaMaximus]

You really should learn html and css at a minimum. Don't rely on software to design your pages. After all, if it breaks, how will you fix it if you don't know what's going on under the hood? Learn visual design (color theory, layout etc.) then practice, practice. Buy a domain and server space ($10.00 per year from GoDaddy) get WSftp to upload your pages and you are off and running.

Regards,
Bill
William Bolton Design
williambolton.com

[JeffrySG]

I think that for straight wisiwig design, dreamweaver and photoshop combo (you could add flash in there too if you need flash content) is the most popular these days. If you know HTML it really is great but you can do very nice stuff without knowing it as well and maybe slowly learn it as you work on your sites.

[rezman]

Dreamweaver is nice, but still tends to be more complex than it needs to be. The website design software that is the most like a desktop publishing program is NetObjects Fusion. It just works.
http://www.netobjects.com/

[Tzan]

I have a Dreamweaver 3 icon on my desktop :)

Its been a while since I made a web site.