I need to design a webpage for my wife’s business. She is a Sewing Instructor, Lecturer, Personality. The site would be biographical and have examples of designs and patterns / finished products, etc.
So, I am wondering, what is the best software out there? I’m pretty good with computers so I’m not really looking for the easiest to work with. Several years ago I bought Adobe Illustrator to do out own newspaper display ads and self-learned much of that program to suit my purposes. I want the one that can do the most with the least limitations. Any advice would be much appreciated. Thanks.
Also would y’all recommend any additional programs like Photoshop?
I used Dreamweaver 2 while in university, and can recommend it as very straightforward. It can be used in a wysiwyg (what you see is what you get) format but you can easily get directly into the HTML to tweak things.
I use dreamweaver, as well. MX is the newest version. You may already have Microsoft Frontpage, if you’ve got MS Office. Check and see. If you have it, you might just want to use that.
I think you’ll be happy with Dreamweaver. Here’s a screenshot of (part of) a personal page I did with it, back in 2002:
(The counter doesn’t work anymore because it’s just locally stored. The winter picture on the left was a java applet with falling snow.)
I found it very easy to make simple, cleancut sites like this with Dreamweaver and I probably could have done more complex ones with very little trouble. One of the features I liked was that if anything didn;t look quite right, you could highlight it, click a button in the corner of the screen and the HTML version of the page would be displayed with the revelent section pre-highlighted.
I use Dreamweaver too and find that you don’t have to type a lot of code if you use their built-in stuff to create rollovers (buttons that change when the mouse goes over them).
You understand, but I’ll restate, that a rollover image is a separate graphic that is swapped for the original version, so that means more playing in illustrator.
You can create styles, too, so you don’t have to keep tweaking the font appearance.
Keep graphics 72 dpi too–higher resolution doesn’t improve appearance and takes longer to load.
If you prefer to directly edit HTML & want a fine-level control over display aspects, I highly recommend NoteTab Pro, it has many fine text & code editing features, as well as lots of available free HTML, PHP and CSS plugins. A free version is available, but if you’re a text/code geek, then this will be the best.
Using FireFox with the WebDeveloper extension lets you check many things on the fly while developing pages, and within one browser compare different browser rendering styles. Two features I use constantly is the “outline elements” and “display ID & class info” to chase down tricky display problems.
FileZilla is one of the better (also free - do you detect a theme?) FTP utilites out there.
I prefer these tools as even the best of the WSYWIG editors tend to add a lot of useless cruft which makes it hard to tweak afterwards. Also, they let you take web pages you like, download them and analyze what they’ve done to achieve nice effects. Eric Meyer’s CSS pages contain great ideas to create simple dynamic elements without using Java or other scripting languages.
For free quick & dirty image editing, IrfanView is one of the best out there.
I’ve heard about Dreamweaver. All good stuff, too. I just don’t want to buy it and then later wish I’d bought another one.