What tools do you web designers use to make your site?

flufflogic

flufflogic

CAG Veteran
I'm trying to get into web designing and all I have is Adobe Dreamweaver CS4 and a video converting tool for making flash vids along with Adobe Photoshop CS4 and Premiere CS4.

I don't have much experience with coding and I'm currently trying to teach myself because my professor never got to it, sadly.

Any tools you can recommend for beginners like me?
 
You can give JScript a shot.

*Edit*

Not trying to put you down or anything but this is something I was told from a professor.

Getting a job as a web designer leaves no room to go anywhere. A wed designer is well a web designer and your at the top of the field.

If your looking to be a coder start working with C#, and JavaScript. I think javascript is gonna be huge with mobile platforms being the new thing.

That's just my 2 cents though.
 
[quote name='SneakyPenguin']The classic answer I've heard from every web designer:

Notepad.[/QUOTE]

only if your crazy...

you can create a webpage from a simple text document saving the extension as html or htm, but you better know your fuck 'in html and css

adobe dreamweaver cs4 does a great job of "helping" you select the correct tags, but you do need a very basic understanding of html. css is like a design shortcut for html, but start with the very basic html first. get familiar with photoshop, but I find myself using illustrator more and more because it is vector and so much cleaner. i dont use fireworks too often because most of it is still incorporated into photoshop.

fuck flash that shit doesnt have the stranglehold grasp on the industry that some designers think. apple refuses to support it for their portable devices, and I am super psyched to see director finally making a comeback!i would say 75% of what most people use flash for could easily be done with html - especially these lame animated banners.

there are no real shortcuts. one thing i have learned as a graphic and web designer is the more experience you havet, the easier (and faster) things becomes. what I would suggest is to create a simple webpage with just html (using dreamweaver - nothing fancy just a simple logo splash / nav bar / footer and maybe 3-5 pages total). then think of what you would like to do to improve its design or usability and use google/lynda/tutorials to help you learn new elements to incorporate. hopefully you were at least taught web standards for file naming, resolution, etc.

damn dude i will revisit this thread because I could go on for hours...
 
[quote name='Shuino']You can give JScript a shot.

*Edit*

Not trying to put you down or anything but this is something I was told from a professor.

Getting a job as a web designer leaves no room to go anywhere. A wed designer is well a web designer and your at the top of the field.

If your looking to be a coder start working with C#, and JavaScript. I think javascript is gonna be huge with mobile platforms being the new thing.

That's just my 2 cents though.[/QUOTE]

I could not disagree more, a web designer is a pimped out graphic designer... because they can do coding and layout. just ease yourself into, but I would recommend trying to stay balanced and learn how to do both, otherwise your job will be very repetitive and you will have to rely on other people to chip in where you are lacking.

also, I think newer incarnations of html and css will incorporate things that people relied on javascript to accomplish. in the future I see things reverting back to simplicity, fast loading pages not bogged down with worthless lines of code to allow you to quickly view pages on smaller and smaller devices. at my job we use a lot of .asp and .net framework is not going anywhere (until google releases their os)
 
metapad > Notepad.

EditPlus is a little more complex, more suited to the specific task.

I highly recommend either over notepad. Everybody should check out metapad though.
 
Web design is not that hard... Really not hard to learn because its the same code over and over. Now it's easier and separate from other "programming."

I use Kompozer (kompozer.net) along with a text editor because kompozer's does not work very well. Reason- Kompozer has a built in CSS editor that let's you see it change as you modify the style. This makes it way better than Notepad... Seriosuly designers using that must be on crack.

For graphics you shouldn't just dive in a download photoshop or something complicated. Really I do well with Paint.NET. All you are going to do is make simple stufflike gradients, text, some stock photos or images...
---
>If you want a full setup from me just send me a pm. I used Kompozer (Used to be NVU) to learn web design along with help online. The fact that it is a WYSIWYG editor makes it great for learning and testing how things will work in a design.

Oh and, if you want a simplified explanation of the web design process-
Make some boxes, style the boxes, style text and add images. -The easy part
Spend hours fixing the code on old crap browser. -The hard part

Edit again- Don't bother with flash, java, and other junk. The things you need to know are (x)html and css.
 
[quote name='SneakyPenguin']The classic answer I've heard from every web designer:

Notepad.[/QUOTE]

[quote name='souljah420']only if your crazy...

you can create a webpage from a simple text document saving the extension as html or htm, but you better know your fuck 'in html and css[/quote]

Knowing your fucking HTML and CSS is what makes you a web designer. Otherwise it's like calling yourself a carpenter, but you have Home Depot make all your cuts and nail your boards for you.

We have clients that like to mock things up for us in Dreamweaver and the first thing we have to do is scrub out all the extraneous AdobeShit that gets added to the HTML document. They are becoming almost as bad as Microsoft in that regard.

That said, around here we use UltraEdit or EditPlus -- they're a little friendlier and more powerful than Notepad.


[quote name='souljah420']fuck flash that shit doesnt have the stranglehold grasp on the industry that some designers think. apple refuses to support it for their portable devices, and I am super psyched to see director finally making a comeback!i would say 75% of what most people use flash for could easily be done with html - especially these lame animated banners.[/quote]

100% agreement. The scores of "web professionals" who masturbate to, and have sold major corporations on, the benefits of a complicated and forever-loading flash navigation as opposed to a simple and quick-loading HTML/CSS combination should be rounded up and sealed in a cave.
 
I'm not a web designer, but I work with several on pretty complex sites (one of my responsibilities is QC lead, so I need to have a pretty firm grasp on how stuff works). Having to do a lot of front-end stuff especially editing XMLs for static text and doing some basic HTML, I find Visual Studio very useful for most everything I do.

Other than that, like others some variation on notepad is always useful (I use Notepad++, but others swear by different programs).
 
[quote name='Ugamer_X']I like notepad++.

Although any alternative to regular notepad is a huge help.[/QUOTE]

Came in here to say this. It's really nice to set the language and be able to hide big chunks of table code at will.
 
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