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Whats a Good Program for building a web site?
My new rep is trying to build me a website, and its not really what I thought it would look like... I want something thats slick and creative... Go figure. Anyway she's taking forever to build this thing and getting pissed off every time I make a comment on it...At this point I would like to build it my self...Whats a good easy program I could use? May 12 05 08:29 pm Link Posted by *Mike D*: There are no tools that will do "slick and creative" easily. You'll probably wind up learning macromedia flash at a minimum, if you want fancy controls or vector graphics that are efficient. May 12 05 08:37 pm Link Well you got Dreamweaver, which is the (what you see is what you get *whizywig*) its pretty easy to use...um lets see, i use it and also i use Homesite (for CSS programming), there is also Microsoft Frontpage, those are the few I know, but im sure there are tons and tons out there, Dreamweaver and Homesite are both Macromedia Products....seeing that Im taking a Web Design course, my design skills have been getting better, and im currently working on a webage of my personal portfolio of my work and such....good luck with the website design  May 12 05 08:41 pm Link I use Dreamweaver and Flash. Dreamweaver I have down, a piece of cake. Flash, I can do some but am still on the learning curve. Like Marcus, I'd stay away from FrontPage. May 12 05 08:41 pm Link Flash MX check them out sir. http://www.jwmessner.com/ Thats hands down one of the best looking web sites around. May 12 05 08:43 pm Link There are lots of free programs out there for web creation. Just Google for some freeware web authoring software. Personally, I code everything by hand and have done so for about 6 or 7 years. So, I don't know anything about fancy programs that do everything for you. I use Dreamweaver, but only for its FTP integration and color-coding of text. I've built dynamic 3-tier database driven sites using VBScript, CSS, HTML, Flash, JavaScript, .ASP, SQLServer and Access. I've designed sites for multimillion dollar e-commerce and internationally know companies. So I have learned a few things. One freeware program that I used years ago was AOLPress, put out by AOL. It is no longer available from AOL, but if you can, try to track down a copy of AOLPress. It was what I started to learn on 8 years ago. If you want a crazy Flash site, just hire www.2advanced.com and let them do all the work. (chuckle) May 12 05 08:46 pm Link Oh, I also forgot to mention - there are ZILLIONS of sites that have great flash scripts and ideas. Some are available for free use, some aren't. There are a few places that have super slick looking stuff that's $19, $20 whatever - which is pretty good. My suggestion is you spend a while browsing around and looking at what kind of flash scripts are out there while you're learning Dreamweaver. It'll influence your design. Expect to waste a lot of time on web site design. It's a bottomless pit of effort. mjr. May 12 05 08:48 pm Link EricMuss-Barnes sez: That's an option. May 12 05 08:51 pm Link Yea I do a lot of my own coding, xhtml and css...dreamweaver is only there if i wanna be lazy, i like to have my brain challenged and usually i get my best stuff that way May 12 05 08:51 pm Link I cheated, I found a template i liked bought it, and customized it in Dreamweaver. I'm a netowrk engineer by trade, for a school district. I deal with so much computer crap I don't have time to learn how to do nice webby stuff. My brain has too much other stuff filling the important spaces, like wife, friends, oh and that work stuff... If I had the money I'd have one of the Kickass designers I know build me a site... But If you want to learn and have the time more power too ya... May 12 05 09:29 pm Link Mikey, Hey, I had same problem. I argued with my web designer so much and would get frustrated when he didn't get what I was saying. It takes time. Remember, they are computer geeks; we are artists. And my site is so simple. If you are going to use Flash, etc...keep in mind..whose gonna update that poop? It costs to update as well. Luckily, I figured out how to do mine and html codes etc... I use Dreamweaver. May 12 05 09:51 pm Link Thanks guys and gals...You rule! one more question. What do you think of Yahoo Site Builder? May 12 05 09:52 pm Link Mike - any of the typical 5 minute fixes are just that fixes - Yahoo - all the ones for other business stuff.. I woudl really think about who your target customer base is.... before doing flash... many people will not wait for flash to load due to dial up or slow internet.... I use Dreamweaver and have for years - it is very good for what I do... but I also do not do alot of hand coding like many.... Feel free to email or IM or call me - I can tell you all the horrors and positives... of different things... Plus I do not argue... even if you are all artists - - I am a mear photographer and web designer.. May 12 05 09:58 pm Link Posted by Naomi Jay: I'm both. May 12 05 10:46 pm Link Posted by *Mike D*: http://lamarcophoto.photosite.com/ May 12 05 10:48 pm Link Posted by *Mike D*: Homesite is a great program and easy to use. May 12 05 10:59 pm Link Check out 1and1.com They have a lot of different packages out of which you can deffinatly find one to suit you. They are easy to work with, have a lot of templates to begin with as well, including simple HTML and now flash. Hosting wise, they wont let you down. Complete custumer care. And for the prices they have, it is deffinetly worth it. Take a look at their demos with which you can actually use their software online, try it out, browse through the templates, add your stuff on to see if you like the look and if its easy to work with, then you can decide whether or not to go any further with them. May 12 05 11:11 pm Link Oh and if you want help building it - feel free to call me... I can give you pointers... plus I like your work so maybe you can teach me something... like trade skill labor. May 13 05 12:36 am Link I think Flash is grossly overused, and mostly just bogs down a site. It's buggy, and you'll get lots of complaints from visitors that it doesn't work or crashes their browser. Most of the time it is just used to make fancy looking graphics that nobody but you cares about. Viewers won't care about your fancy graphics if it just causes their browser to crash. They'll avoid your site, which pretty much defeats the whole purpose. I'd avoid Flash. If you know what you are doing, you can make reasonably nice looking sites with basic HTML, it'll run much faster, and you won't have any problems with user compatibility. Add my name to the list of people who dislike Frontpage. It uses lots of code specific to Internet Explorer, and the pages won't load right for people using the variety of other Browser software out there. Explorer is currently declining in popularity, and Firefox seems to be making a significant dent in the browser wars, so it isn't a good idea to create a site that only works with Explorer. I us Adobe GoLive, which nobody has mentioned yet. I haven't tried Dreamweaver, so I don't know which one is better. I've just been using this for several years, and I'm used to it. I've never had a single complaint from anyone that my website doesn't work. Complaints about my photo choices, occasional typos, and cheesy sense of humor, but never complaints about browser compatibility. GoLive is a WYSIWYG program. It is fairly complex, and will have a significant learning curve if you know nothing about website design. The other option is to hire a teenager. Seems like any kid over the age of 12 is a web designer these days. :-) May 13 05 01:31 am Link I agree. Usually flash is just a pain in the ass. I avoid it. Then again, I still use the same basic site I designed in 1999 in notepad. I prefer simple, clean and to the point. May 13 05 01:33 am Link Learn Dreamweaver and CSS before even attempting Flash. I started doing HTML in 1994 and used Adobe's editors from 1995 (did demos for them even) until last year when a grad course required me to use Dreamweaver and learn CSS (which I had avoided for years). I'm amazed at how much the technology has changed and how silly I was to avoid the good stuff. May 13 05 08:50 am Link I find it odd that none of you use the most obvious photographer's tool for your web sites - Photoshop. I use Photoshop to get the site to look exactly how I want it to look, then add text and CSS with CuteHTML. Flash is nice, but for most photography sites, I think it's a bit too much. Customers with slower connections will really appreciate a simple, but creative-looking site. May 13 05 11:02 am Link Oops - I use photoshop so much I forgot about it... I use it for site pages all the time... then use Dreamweaver to stitch it all together.. May 13 05 11:03 am Link Posted by *Mike D*: Avoid it like the Plague. Sucks. No creativity. May 14 05 01:27 am Link May 14 05 01:27 am Link Posted by Scott Aitken: I totally agree. My sites are all flash-free. SO why did I suggest that flash was something he might want to learn? 'Cuz he said he wanted something sexy and snappy. I'm totally into simple sites with text-based menus (talk about fast!) but a lot of people complain that's frumpy-looking. May 14 05 10:16 am Link First, learn how to code html with a regular text editor. It won't take that long and even with the best WYSIWYG editor like Dreamweaver, chances are you'll still have to tweak code in text mode. Then learn CSS and what you can do with that, and then worry about Flash. Photoshop will turn out some good galleries if that's all you want and you can tweak those. Flash has its advantages and disadvantages. Like html, it gets misused alot to produce ugly looking things. It's slow and requires the Flash plug-in. However, it displays consistantly across platform and brwoser much better than html. It's great for animation, but most anything else you can do in javascript. However, not matter how bad Flash is, it works much better than javascript, especially cross platfrom and browser. Many photographers like it because it is one of the simpler ways to try and protect images since you can embed them in a flash site and prevent it from being edited. This prevents people from easily downloading photos to their local machine. However, the viewer can still alwasy just do a screen capture. May 14 05 02:39 pm Link When I see flash ------> SKIP INTRO Show me the stuff.....the meat! Flash should he used transparently. May 14 05 02:55 pm Link Posted by michaelGIORDANO: as soon as i see that flash loading up..i exit... May 14 05 03:02 pm Link |
One man's sizzlin' is another man's bacon, etc. 