Web Design Software

[SMEE]

Can anyone recommend any good FREE web design software to me pls? I want one that can give professional looking results, but is fairly user friendly.

Muchas Gracias

[CaleyD]

Much depends on what kind of site your looking to produce, what existing knowledge you have, the language you want to programme in, do you want to build it from scratch or do you want to use a CMS (Content Management Software) or other similar software and then just tinker with the template/look etc etc etc.

WYSIWYG Site Builders do exist (think Frontpage), but whilst they can look professional on the surface (with a little work) they generally won't give you a site which will perform well in search engines and across various browsers.

If your just after a personal or club site or something really simple then check out Spanglefish.com - I've never used them but I know a few people who have sites with them and are happy with what can be produced.

[SMEE]

Web Design is something i have been thinking of investigating for a while. I am toying with maybe doing an OU course. I have found out the software they use for that is NVu.....which is free...so i have downloaded it and will get a wee blast on it

[Scotty]

Investigate this site ..... http://www.w3schools.com/default.asp

This may also be of interest

http://www.w3.org/

[CaleyD]

I'm entirely self taught and I started out throwing together stuff in FrontPage and my interest grew from there, so something like NVu is probably as good a starting place as any in terms of "Web Design".

Although you won't learn too much about the programming behind the page to start with (as it does most of it for you), there's a great sense of achievement in getting your first website under your belt.

From there you'll soon know if it's for you (Web Design) as you'll want to know how certain things are done and they'll very likely be beyond the limits of software such as NVu and you'll have to start investigating the code behind them and then learning the language.

I did try OU Computing and Web Design courses in the past but ditched them pretty quickly as I found them slow and boring, if your a fast learner or get bored quickly then I'd dip your toe in by doing some things yourself before splashing out on courses....but that's just my opinion, and others may have more/different experience of it than me.

[starchief]

PageBreeze is a pretty decent freeware WYSIWYG program.

[stevico1]

One things for sure it aint easy, sos Caley D :thumb04:

[Apollo]

If your considering doing a course I'd possibly recommend learning HTML or one of the other simple languages give yourself a good basic knowledge in web design

[starchief]

Could just get an older version of FrontPage off eBay. Be cheap, good software for most purposes and do just about everything a newer version will do at a fraction of the cost.

[Scotty]

Frontpage is a waste of time. If you must buy a WYSIWYG package then Dreamweaver would be my choice.

FP might look fine as far as WYSIWYG is concerned but its underlying code is so dirty that no self respecting web designer would go near it. There are free options out there that I would rank higher than FP but most of the designers I know edit their code by hand using nothing more than a text editor such as notepad++ or editplus.

As far as courses are concerned. Agree that an HTML course is a good place to start as that will give a basic grounding but also consider courses in CSS, PHP and other web technologies (MySQL, Apache, ASP etc) as these are in demand from employers. The CSS/PHP recommendation came to me from a web designer I used to work with at the Globe and Mail newspaper who was headhunted recently to go head up a department for MSNBC !!!