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Web Design
Posted by AccountingWEB on Wed, 08/11/2006 - 10:49
own a subsidiary company and want to try & design our own site for it. Nothing complicated - a logo, some text, white background, etc and a few (<4 pages).
Is anyone able to recommend a software package for us to use? We are computer literate, my female partner has excellent taste and we know what we want to say!
Amateur
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Although I hard code myself I would suggest....
Macromedia Dreamweaver, you can read about it and download a 30 day evaluation copy here.
Dave Barker
Senior Production Manager
AccountingWEB
Web design
Agreed - Dreamweaver and Fireworks suite will do the job for you. Fairly easy to pick up if computer literate.
Or...
Microsoft Expression Web is in beta version at present and is a free download here: http://www.microsoft.com/products/expression/en/web_designer/wd_free_trial.aspx
Very nice product - and not a "typical" Microsoft product - strong support for standards, other browsers etc.
Also, it's well worth searching the web for templates to get you started. Google for "free web templates" (or something like that), wade through the rubbish and you'll find a collection of pages that give you a huge head start. www.freelayouts.com is just one such site but there are lots of others. I'd suggest you get one which makes heavy use of "css" to make your life easier (probably best to put css in whatever search term you use).
Hope this helps.
If it's THAT simple....
If that's really all you want just follow my advice, given elswhere on A/W, and buy a book called 'Designing Web Pages Made Simple' or similar. As I have said before, this is the best instructional book that I have ever read and is part of a series of similarly-titled books on various IT subjects, including VBA for Excel, which I also own.
You could have your 4 pages up and running in less than an hour without buying any software: It can all be done in any text editor that can save as HTML. Word will do.
Try MS VS 2005 Express .....
Microsoft Expression Web Beta 1 is:
a. a fairly hefty download
b. in beta
In all honesty it is questionable whether under the circumstances you should be using this sort of technology unless there are spare pc available on which to install it. Therefore if it all goes wrong no real damage has been done - just wasted time
Macromedia
I must admit to a slight bias here. Personally I hate any any internet app that that insists the user downloads any form of support code (i.e. OCX etc) before the site will run.
The 'best practice' approach is therefore to also cater for users who dont want to install Macromedia; otherwise you are limiting your audience
Load times - how many occasions have you been presented with a splash page containing a loading indicator with the resulting wait for things to happen? As a guide, if it cannot run in 5-8 seconds then forget it because the user threshold for instant results is very fickle
By all means use these tools as an addition to your site but not as the foundation. Whilst the immediate intention is something simple, what are your final goals once you begin to become familiar with what can be acheieved.
Try a bit of crystal ball gazing because one of the major killers of any development is 'scope creep'; as something simple turns into a major exercise and if the wrong tools are used at the outset a fair amount of back-tracking takes place.
If you want free (almost) Mircosoft stuff have a look at 'Visual Studio 2005 Express' (http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/express/) and its companion 'SQL Server 2005 Express' which a number of software houses are adopting as their desktop db. You will need to deploy on an appropriate service provider platform - have a look at Zen (http://www.zen.co.uk/) as one of many who can provide an aspx service