Basic Web Design Software And How To Choose It
To start creating websites, you need some basic web design software. The questions is, do you know what you need to start designing a website? In this article, we will explain to you just that. Generally, the most basic web design software is an HTML editor, CSS editor and Image editor. Those are the main programs that you need in order to start creating web pages.
WYSIWYG HTML editors are perhaps the best type of all HTML editors and are perfect for people who are just making their way into HTML or even professionals who like using the extra features and options. Such 'What You See Is What You Get' HTML editors provide an editing interface which looks just the way the web page is going to appear in a web browser, so you can edit every element on the page directly, without even knowing a single HTML tag. This makes the entire process of web design faster and easier. Of course, they also allow you to directly modify the HTML code.
Coffee Cup and Adobe Dreamweaver are probably the most popular HTML editors at the moment. CoffeeCup comes with more than 100 DHTML & JavaScripts, a DHTML Menu wizard, 25,000 Graphics and Photos including over 1,000 XP Style Icons. It also has Built-in FTP Uploading and easy to use Table, Frame, Font, and Form Designers.
In addition to drag-and-drop features that help you build web pages, Adobe Dreamweaver provides a full-featured coding environment that includes code-editing tools (such as code coloring, tag completion, a coding toolbar, and code collapse) and language reference material on Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), JavaScript, ColdFusion Markup Language (CFML), and other languages. Adobe Dreamweaver and Coffee Cup have built-in support for CSS files, so you can edit CSS files without needing a seperate CSS editor. But if your html editor doesn't have CSS support, then you should also get a special editor for CSS files. CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets and it's important because it defines the presentation of a document written in HTML or XHTML. Rapid CSS Editor (http://www.blumentals.net/rapidcss/) allows you to quickly and easily create and edit cascading style sheets of any size and complexity. You can write the style sheet code manually or let the program do it for you. In each case it is easy because of the many helpful features, including auto complete, code inspector and CSS checker. Results are shown instantly with the built-in preview. Style Master is another CSS editor, available at http://www.westciv.com/, for $US59.99. WYSIWYG editors are great when you're starting out, but as you get more experience with CSS you'll find that lots of simple properties and selectors are more easily coded by hand. But hand coding can be a drag, so Style Master has everything you need to hand code CSS productively. Some of the wizards in the software let you create all the code for a particular design element, effect, or even a whole site, without having to think focus on the implementation details. Image editors allow you to change the properties of digital images, such as size, contrast, saturation. LView Pro is a multi-featured image processor software suited to a wide variety of applications, ranging from simple image viewing to advanced image editing. It fits into our basic web design software category, because it comes at a reasonable price of $40. Of course, Adobe Photoshop CS3 is the far better choice, but it costs $649.
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