What's the best program for Web Design?

[jacatone]

I'm interested in learning Web Design and wondered what's the best program to learn. Seems there's a lot of choices out there, but I want to learn the program that is considered the industry standard. Thanks.

[boxcarracer767]

If your a newbie I would suggest Frontpage, not html expeierence needed.

For more advanced I would suggest Flash, Dreamweaver

[mairving]

If you want to build pastel, boring web pages with overly bulky deprecated code, use FrontPage. If you are building a personal site for yourself and don't care that much about how it works, then FP might be a good option.

I would suggest that whatever you do learn HTML first. You don't have to hand-code but it is worth knowing how to. You should also learn CSS to properly format text. Whatever else you learn depends upon the direction that you take from there. If you are artistic, you will need Photoshop and Illustrator. If you want to build dynamic web pages learn a scripting language like PHP along with SQL. Still it all starts back with HTML. Once you learn HTML, then you can decide on which editor to use. I use Homesite, which is strictly for hand-coding. If you want a WYSIWYG editor, then go with Dreamweaver.

[wilbasket23]

what is homesite is it a web design program. coz i hear ppl before say homesite is a web site or sth

[chris1977uk]

i agree with mairving

frontpage sucks and blows!!

get the HTML basics, i use Interdev, but dreamweaver is ok too.

use something like interdev or dreamweaver and learn the tags and what they do. then u can hand-code if thats what u want to do.

thats what i did, and im a total handcoder, even though i use interdev, i like the colours, and it tells me if i miss out a " or something!!!!

[Sanke]

You're better off hand-coding your own work first, then using a WYSIWYG editor, that way you know what it's doing wrong and can correct it.

I've used hand-coding programs like HTML-KIT, I'm not too fond of not being able to see what changes you're making in the website in real time. So I use Dreamweaver, there's a new one coming out soon, along with Flash and other products built by Macromedia, you can also purchase Studio Mx 04 (which will be v.7) it includes Dreamweaver, Flash, Fireworks and Coldfusion (and probably something else, but I forgot).

So, to sum it up, if you can afford it, get a good WYSIWYG editor, like Dreamweaver, but don't get Frontpage, although Microsoft have released a new version, it's a waste of money.

[mairving]

Originally posted by wilbasket23 what is homesite is it a web design program. coz i hear ppl before say homesite is a web site or sth

Homesite is an HTML editor, originally developed by a company called Allaire. Macromedia now owns Allaire as well as Homesite and they are well on their way to ruining it.

[Statica]

While on the subject, I cant stand HomeSite 5.xx ; I've stuck with 4.5.2 (the Allaire one). I've stuck with it since the Nick Bradbury days(before Allaire), and its one of the cleanest programs out there.

You might want to check out Top Style, another great complement to a web editor.

[mairving]

I haven't had problems with Homesite 5.0. Now 5.2 was a nightmare. I downloaded it and did an upgrade. Well the upgrade failed because of a serial number issue, even though I had valid serial numbers for version 4, 4.5 and 5.0. So when I stopped the installation, I could no longer use version 5.0. So I emailed Macromedia asking for an urgent reply to this problem. Well they replied back, a week later, with a link to their website about installing the program that didn't even address the problem. So I had to unistall version 5.0, find the other disks for previous versions and load them.

Since DW is their preferred HTML editor, I expect that they will drop HS soon. The only good thing about version 5 is that they dropped the design view which was useless anyway.