Way OT: Web Design Software

[Fu-Pow]

Does anyone know of any really user friendly software out there that I could use to create a web page and easily upload it?

My school's web site needs some serious redesign/updating and the guy who designed our old page is no longer at the school.

I don't want to take the time to learn HTML but I'd like to put something together that looks decent and is functional.

Any ideas?

Thanks in advance.

[David Jamieson]

dreamweaver by macromedia.

see if you can get a copy of ver3 or higher.

really excellent tool.

cheers

[T'ai Ji Monkey]

AFAIK, Fireworks and Dreamweaver are commonly used.

HTML can be learned in a few hours, all those web-design tools will generate a LOT of unneccessary code that will make your site biggish.

In most cases you can cut the coding down by 1/3 ~ 1/2 if not more and still retain the same look and functionality.

Most people I know do at the most the basic layout in a web-design tool and than start to edit the code directly.

Like I said those tools are fine for beginner to intermediate level people.

[Sho]

Pico and Photoshop.

If you have Microsoft Office, you can install FrontPage from the CD-ROM and start publishing. I don't know how FrontPage works nowadays, but if it doesn't already have a built-in FTP tool, you can download any freeware program to transfer files.

[[Censored]]

If you want something simple, you can make it in MS Word 2000 or later and select the "Save as Web Page" option.

[MasterKiller]

Kung Lek has redesigned the correct with some new roll-over buttons, and FTP'd it to the server.

Dreamweaver is by far the most user friendly program if you want a nice-looking site. Combine that with some Fireworks knowledge, and you can make a professional looking site failry easily.

Stay away from using Word...it suxors.

[David Jamieson]

Word and Front Page by MS are the tools real web designers stay the ****hest away from. They really are blech, and ms is naughty for pushing them on an unsuspecting and otherwise unknowing public.

Too much left over extraneous and dirty markup language left all of the place. The only good tool for the web by ms is Vbasic for the development platform. It's cool, but their html tools are terrible, clunky and generally for one off "give your colleague a doc online" kind of stuff. They were never intended to actually design and build websites. LOL, they were designed to integrate with MS enterprise systems.

Go with the Macromedia products, they will give you clean code that you can easily understand when you are looking at it plain. Also, the dynamic stuff is pretty cool too.

I like to use a combo of hard coding with notepad and a wysiwyg tool like dw and javascript to build site with. It is good for style sheets as well, or asp, php, cfm pages. you name it, it's teh industry standard.

and now, back to more about kungfu

[Goldenmane]

Macromedia's Dreamweaver hands-down for my vote. Kung Lek is right, ver3 or higher. 4 is good.

Frontpage is... how do you say "total absolute crap" politely?

And if you're looking at Word, may as well learn HTML and all the rest and write it up in Notepad or something.

But you're after user-friendly... so Dreamweaver probably is the thing for you. Has its downfalls, but less than most.

[SevenStar]

screw frontpage.

go for dream weaver ultradev. Use photoshop for the graphics. You can also try Allaire's Homesite, but they were bought out by macromedia anyway, so you may as well use dream weaver.


Someone said above that you can learn html in a few hours. Yes and no. the nested table elements can be confusing to newbies. Also, you can't learn DESIGN in a few hours.

You can filter out the extra code that is added in some utilities. His is not some huge commercial company anyway, so the few extra hundredths of a second added in load time won't matter much. My company, for example, is measured constantly by keynote and others. We HAVE to have a fast load time.

[MasterKiller]

I think Ultradev, in this case, is over-kill. He only needs a decent school site.

Just get a trial copy of DreamWeaver MX and Fireworks MX (for graphics) from macromedia.com, and spend the next 30 days working on the website.

[Tak]

Originally posted by Sho
Pico and Photoshop.

Nano's a million times better than pico. By definition! (Only a thousand times if you're in the US.)

[Starchaser107]

I'm currently using Dreamweaver mx it's totally off the heeezey 4 sheeezey!

[Becca]

Originally posted by [Censored]
If you want something simple, you can make it in MS Word 2000 or later and select the "Save as Web Page" option.

Would use FrontPage before Word. It's ok if that's all you got, but is extremly clumsy and hard to make it play nice.

I actually like FrontPage for it's convinience in putting that finishing touch on a site. And it is easy to learn for a Windows user since it uses alot of the same componants.
I also like VB. But I also usually start by scrapping everything but the #include and writting everything myself...

Note: if going to use the auto features, go into the source code and delete all the code in grey that the program puts in by default, or you will have a hard time debugging. And DO NOT use the "Debug" feature- that thing s[u]cks big time.