Best Website design Software

J

jpd300

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Ju
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What is the best web design software out there for a newbie, I did mine in frontpage2003 and found it fairly hard going to make a very basic site.

As its quite old now I thought there must be better ones out there, any recommendations.

I did a Google search and coffee cup came up but that looks like its uses a lot of html coding :gag:

Thanks
Julian
 
The new Flash Catalyst in CS5 looks very handy for photographers who may not know a great deal about coding etc. and just need a nice online folio.

Had a look over at a mate's today, he's just upgraded to CS5 and has knocked together a pretty slick looking gallery in next to no time.

Basically you can design your site in Illustrator, Photoshop, or whatever you're used to using, and then simply open the files in Catalyst and tell it what bits are what. eg, what you want as a button, what's a scroll bar, etc.

I'm yet to see anything online though, so I don't know how quick it'll all run. Doesn't look bad as a starting point though for someone who doesn't know too much about the techno side of things.

Of course it's not going to be the cheapest option out there.
 
CS5 Sounds like a lot of ££££, i am ok with a gallery as i just use lightroom to do it and export as web its good enough for me.

I am looking more at general web site design at the mo.

Thanks
 
jpd300 said:
What is the best web design software out there for a newbie
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I can highly recommend Xara Web Designer.
It's perfect for someone with little to no HTML knowledge, it produces clean code which validates 100%
You can build your site via some supplied templates or from scratch using tools provided.
Easily embed videos, galleries (or create you own using built-in HighSlide popups) and more.

There is also a very active and well supported user forum where help is very forthcoming and very friendly, including a place to show off your Web Designer created sites.

Yes I use Web Designer (can you tell ;) )
 
Xara's software is all pretty damn good. Can't fault it if you have no design experience.
 
That's will take a look at xara.

Thanks for the offer barry, but this is something i would like to get to know more.

Thanks
 
Its a balance - the more coding and principles you learn, the more control you can have over the site. I personally use dreamweaver, and notepad

The less coding you learn, the less in control of the final result... you get to a point where you are fighting the code generated by the software... that's the point where you learn or give in
 
Why use notepad if you have dreamweaver? Surely you would be better off using the coding editor in DW with line numbers, colour coding, ftp etc... instead of black and white text and a separate ftp client. Or at least scrap them both and use html-kit or notepad++
 
flicker said:
Why use notepad if you have dreamweaver? Surely you would be better off using the coding editor in DW with line numbers, colour coding, ftp etc... instead of black and white text and a separate ftp client. Or at least scrap them both and use html-kit or notepad++
Click to expand...

I use notepad as a scrap book, and for editing individual isolated PHP files that I cant be asked to import into dreamweaver

Dreamweaver tends to take a whole site view. As a designer who works on all sorts of sites at different stages in the development (sometimes many sites in one day) - i find that Dreamweaver can be a bit OTT in some scenarios - e.g. In the situation where a client just needs a template file tweak, and I haven't ever seen the site before, notepad is king

I find Dreamweaver good in the instance a whole site build etc.
 
sledger said:
That's getting a little OT for the OP
Click to expand...

True. in this instance, I recommend the OP sticks with frontpage, as the investment in anything else will not outweigh the benefits

Investment = time (learning curve), money
 
Thanks all, download a trial of xara, will have a look at wordpress or joomla.

Going by whats being said just using a application like frontpage is not enough one need to get to know html, css, java, php etc. :gag:
 
andrewc said:
Wordpress or Joomla can give pretty professional looking results with minimal coding experience.
Click to expand...

Wordpress and Joomla are platforms, not site building software

With no knowledge, you can do a lot with wordpress/joomla, however once you want to depart from the standard offerings, or the templates / components / modules / extensions you can find, then doing anything else is 100 times harder, as the coding technology / scale is totally beyond most people

Assuming most photographers are creative's, they will want to stamp their own look, feel and functionality on a site. Unfortunatally, the only way of doing this is to create your own graphics, code and string it all together

The choice of coding package then becomes important. Some deal with the visuals, and have a good wysiwyg interface, but output horrendous code that is very awkward to edit. Some (like dreamweaver) provide a fairly good WYSIWYG environment, and have excelent code formatting and hinting, but without understanding the code, generating a good site will still be hard

I cant really think of a way of getting total control, without a decent array of packages to create graphics, and a reasonable command of CSS and HTML
 
Thanks all, download a trial of xara, will have a look at wordpress or joomla.

Going by whats being said just using a application like frontpage is not enough one need to get to know html, css, java, php etc. :gag:
 
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