egafd.com

Dreamweaver is best if you dont want to bother with html as you can create a web page like you can create a letter using Word or a results table using spreadsheet, but before you go use it or any other web making progs (take a look at www.moonfruit.com) you should read up on web sites that offer knowledge on web designing, web codeing, uploading, etc...

Well thanks to all of you especially Michelle (who had me checking the train prices to London) cheers folk's

For adult site design using the macromedia studio mx package which includes dreamweaver/fireworks/flash/freehand it's not so much the dreamweaver I use but fireworks. That is where I do all the fancy graphics/text/logo/rollover buttons/page design/feathered images etc. I just use dreamweaver for adding a little bit of text, links, meta stuff and for uploading. Fireworks exports your design as a web ready html page!

http://www.britishsex.cn

Notepad and a good knowledge of HTML!!

Failing that at the budget end Hot Metal Pro and at the expensive end Dreamweaver. Adobe Page Mill is OK too, and if the worse comes to the worse, if you've got one of the latests editions of Word you can "convert" a Word document into a web page (but it won't be pretty).

If you DO use any of these packages it's always useful to edit some of the extraneous code they add, just to help the page load quicker.

Bob S
www.fullservice.org.uk

Getting back to your original post, just remember that a lot of these snazzy gimmicks like flash, and dreamweaver use stuff liek shockwave, flash, and java plugins, as well as java scrips. you dont necessarily know its putting these scripts in as you never look at teh code its generating.

Thsi means that any fancey stuff WILL NOT SHOW ANY ANY BROWSER. it will require plugins.

The only way to ensure its going to work on any orginary browser is to comply stricylt to the HTML standard with noting else involved.

Adobe Pagemill will stick to teh HTML standard, and allow you to set up pages as you view them just like making a page in word. Unlike dreamweaver and others, it does not attempt to insert anything other than HTML into the code so you should be fine will all browsers.

Many web designers thing the flashy stuff looks impressive and will argue that the user will be prompted to install a plug-in if they dont have it already. Research shows that about 75% of internet users have no idea whats going on when that happens and subsequently just leave the site.

For a course in introductory WP Design (after stating out in Notepad to get the idea of HTML) we were advised to use Homesite. For assessment purposes any non-standard HTML was strictly verboten and transgressors were marked-down heavily. It's available for a free 60 day trial and I found it easy to use, even for a non-tekkie like me. Off hand I can't recall the price of full registration, but if you want a package to try for free, even if not for the long term,it might be worth having a look at.

Since then the S/W firm that made it has been taken over by whoever makes Dreamweaver. The add-on Topsite that produces CSS has been released as freeware, so possibly Homesite might follow, but I understand it's been redesigned so that users can advance on to use Dreamweaver via it if they wish to, so it might be useful if you want to get more tekkie in the future.

Hope it helps.