I have a few questions about desinging a site:

What is the best program to desing a site? Question
What program do you use to design nice pictures and banners?

Plz give some info!! Exclamation

Best program to design a site is a text editor. Choose any flavour you like, Vi, emacs, editplus for windows. In this sense I'm old school.

Alright, I give you that the modern design programs like DreamWeaver have come long way from what the WYSIWYG editors were at nineties and they probably work well for trying out things and so on. But for the future of web designing - or what I think we should be doing now - is the separation of content and design and I myself find little need to do designing with a WYSIWYG editor. Anyways I don't condemn anyone for using them, it's just not my thing.

Graphics... If I was old school with the page degigning I'm very predictabl with the graphics issue. Yep, Photoshop for me. Simply it is just best graphics design software ever produced.

The best thing for designing either a web site or graphics is that little gray matter that sits between your ears. Yep, the brain. =^^= The creation process starts with inspiration—once you have that, you've got it made, regardless of what software you use. When it comes to design, technicality rarely matters. It's a common complaint of my brother that teachers nowadays focus more on the technicalities of website development (e.g. HTML tags, web scripts, etc.) and neglect helping their students develop aesthetics, and I agree. So if you plan to design a website, then first plan out what you want to do, especially if you're making everything scratch instead of using a template. Do what I do, make a storyboard. Write or draw out what you want to do with your website then, when you have a general idea of how the finished product will be like, start coding.

None of this answers your question, of course, but I'll get to that. Those things just had to be said, and now that that's out of the way, here's what you were looking for:

HTML Editors

There are two kinds of HTML editors available: text-based and WYSIWYG.

Text-based editors are those that require handcoding—meaning that all HTML tags and scripts must be typed by the user. Those who want to use a text-based editor must have a good knowledge of HTML tags and syntax. Notepad, the default text editor which comes with most version of the Windows OS, is an example of a text-based editor (BTW, I don't recommend using it as it has no rendering styles, meaning that things can get confusing if your HTML code gets too long).

WYSIWYG stands for What You See Is What You Get. It is a word used to describe a system in which content during editing appears very similar to the final product. MS Word is an example of a WYSIWYG editor—when you type in bold, the final result is also bold (BTW, though MS Word can also be used as an HTML editor, I very strongly recommend that you NOT use it, as it adds a lot of useless code to the HTML file).

Below is a list of HTML editors, both text-based and WYSIWYG.

Text-based editors

• Notepad++ (freeware) features: syntax highlighting, syntax folding
• CSE HTML Validator Lite (freeware) features: syntax highlighting, syntax checking, HTML validation
• HTML-Kit (freeware) (recommended) features: syntax highlighting, syntax checking, HTML validation, active preview, built-in FTP workspace

WYSIWYG editors

• Microsoft Frontpage (commercial)
• Macromedia Dreamweaver (commercial)
• Nvu (freeware) (recommended)

Graphics Editors

There are three types of graphics: raster graphics, vector graphics, and animations. Usually, different software are used to create raster and vector images, with some exceptions. Animations can be either rasters or vectors and are handled with a special program that puts together multiple layers or images to create the illusion of movement.

Raster graphics software

• Adobe Photoshop (commercial) (recommended)
• Paint Shop Pro (commercial)
• Paint.Net (freeware)
• PhotoPlus (freeware)
• GIMP (freeware) (recommended)

Vector graphics software

• Adobe Illustrator (commercial) (recommended)
• CorelDRAW (commercial)
• Inkscape (freeware)
• DrawPlus (freeware)

Animation graphis software

• Adobe ImageReady (commercial) (recommended) notes: bundled with Adobe Photoshop
• Animation Shop (commercial)
• GIMP Animation Package (freeware) (recommended) notes: a plugin for GIMP

That's all for now; I'm rather tired after that post. Hope this helps! =^^=

I use Windows Notepad, myself. If you know basic HTML tags, you can use this nifty little program to code your entire site.

You can also search at download.com for Web site software. Most programs just let you click on the elements that you want to add (i.e. a table, plain text, or photos, etc.) and drop them in.

But if you'd rather just do it yourself (which I've found gives me more control over where things show up on my pages, and of course how they look), you can learn some pretty good things at htmlgoodies.com - free and easy to understand.

For web design, I prefer to use these three programs: Adobe Photoshop CS+ , Macromedia Flash & Dreamweaver. I use photoshop to design the page layouts, and flash to create a flashy header. Then i use dreamweaver to put everything together and add the content. It sounds simple but it's hard... I still can't finish my site because I can't stick with one good layout.

If you dont happen to be using MS Windows and want a free graphic editor you can always use GIMP. It is also available for MS Windows. As for a web editor theres this really nice one called NVU which is also available for both Windows and Linux. These two programs are completely free and work really well for most situations. As for me, I personally use Notepad and Photoshop CS2. I dont prefer using a WYSIWYG editor because it will usually add uneeded tags or tag properties, and its sometimes harder to understand the code later on. Hope this helps.

-QuantumFlux

For my webdesign now I am using PHP Designer 2006, for graphics the Gimp just works for me, on Linux and on Windows, but when using Linux I am using Bluefish, those are quite good for me. I used to use simple text editors and editplus too, but when my scripts got really big, I need a lot of features to see the code. what I don't like about PHP Designer, that it is slow when changing between Tabs, but I got used to it.

For my webdesign now I am using PHP Designer 2006, for graphics the Gimp just works for me, on Linux and on Windows, but when using Linux I am using Bluefish, those are quite good for me. I used to use simple text editors and editplus too, but when my scripts got really big, I need a lot of features to see the code. what I don't like about PHP Designer, that it is slow when changing between Tabs, but I got used to it.

i think it best to use dreamweaver as it automaticly codes it for you and there are loads of fetures and it automaticly creates css style sheets and its simple to use

After I learned basic html I used dreamweaver for a fair while. IT's good for making quality sites with little effort or knowledge, but you don't learn much really. Personally I prefer just using text editors with syntax highlighting for the various web languages (html, php, etc)

My favorite would be bluefish. I used to use some random ones for windows but since I found bluefish I usually stick to doing my web editing in linux and use the fish. It's nothing amazingly special it just has a nice flow and layout for my liking. Setable syntax highlighting, easy file navigation, good stuff. Handles all the usual types of files and if you use a different one you can still choose which type of syntax highlighting to use.