Capital Professional Services » Web Design

Web Design Software

Lisa McMahon — Sat, 11 Apr 2009 17:13:16 +0000

I have to confess … please don’t hate me — I loved FrontPage. I began using FrontPage when it was first owned by Vermeer in the mid-90′s. I have owned every version from that initial version and have recently begun learning Microsoft Expression Web 2. (I had Expression Web 1 on my PC for awhile but never used it.)

I’ve used a lot of different products over the years including NetObjects Fusion and Dreamweaver. I currently use Dreamweaver CS3 for most of my web development, mostly because of its tight integration with Flash, Photoshop and Fireworks. I am hoping to learn the entire Microsoft Expression Studio as I’ve read lots of good reviews and I find the interface comfortable.

Microsoft Expression Web 2 Features

Professional web design environment
Standards based site design
CSS layout
CSS site templates
CSS style application
CSS Management
Property task pane
Rich data presentation
ASP.NET 3.5
Edit PHP pages

New $299

Namo Web Editor 8

New user interface – ribbon menu
Effective presentation features
Teaching plan wizard
A variety of quiz features
Easy statistics learning
DIV tag through visual not just code
Rich design resources
Connect to a blog

New $99

CoffeeCup HTML Editor 2008

HTML and CSS code completion
Project management
Quick tag help
Quick start from layout
Optimized resource tabs
Cleaner, valid markup

Full version $49

NetObjects Fusion 11

AJAX UI components
AJAX effects and transitions
Data source XML binding
Databind to any object
XHTML 1.0 publishing
Automatic code hinting
Integrate custom scripts
Image gallery
Google site traffic tools
Integrated web apps

Full version $199.95

NetObjects Fusion Essentials

Drag and drop layouts
Site Management Tools
Upload files with built-in FTP
Form builder
Photo Gallery
e-commerce tool
Custom shape tools
Rollover images
Insert custom HTML and scripts
Flash, QuickTime, and more

Free download

You can build a web site in 30 minutes

Lisa McMahon — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 17:25:39 +0000

For the purpose of this example, we are going to use Google Sites.

Navigate to http://sites.google.com with your browser. You will need a Google account to create a free site. If you use any of Google’s services, such as Google Mail, you already have account. Click on Create site.

You will be presented with a form to complete. Enter the name for your site, a short (optional) description and select a theme. If you don’t want anyone to see what you are designing, select “Only people I specify” for Share with. I didn’t like the themes so I clicked on the More themes link and was presented with about two dozen themes.

Finally, you will need enter the code displayed. This is to prevent automated programs from maliciously creating a bunch of sites on Google’s servers.

Click the Create site button and you will be presented with Google’s site building tool. Click the Edit page button and begin typing.

HTML Editors

Lisa McMahon — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 15:38:07 +0000

To view pages published on the World Wide Web you need a web browser. Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, and Safari are the most popular. The pages that you see on the Internet have been created by publishers such as yourself using a special markup language called HTML (HyperText Markup Language). This language provides the instructions to the browser on how to display the page.

The simplest form of HTML pages, also called static HTML, can be created by anyone with a text editor. For example, Windows users could use the built-in Windows Notepad application to create web pages. Although you could use this application, there are other HTML editors available which are much easier to use. Notepad2 is a free, lightweight editor that includes syntax highlighting for a number of programming languages including HTML. A more comprehensive editor is Arachnophilia, which is built using Java so that it will work on a number of different operating systems.

Most word processing applications, like Microsoft Word and OpenOffice provide a way to save regular documents as HTML documents but they usually contain a lot of extra code to support the formatting you have used.

Quite a few of the web hosting companies offer site building tools but you will quickly find them limiting. See Yahoo! GeoCities or Google Sites.

Even if you decide to purchase a software package to assist you, I recommend that you learn at least the basics of HTML coding.

The following are some commonly used text editors that may be used to create web pages (must know HTML):

WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) web authoring tools

Free	Inexpensive	Not cheap
KompoZer SeaMonkey Amaya Trellian Aptana Studio (works with Eclipse) Bluvoda Evrsoft First Page	Freeway (for Macs) iWeb (for Macs) RapidWeaver (for Macs)	Adobe Dreamweaver Altova Microsoft Expression Web NetObjects Fusion

Getting Started

Lisa McMahon — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 17:00:22 +0000

You know you should have a web site but you don’t know where to begin. Or perhaps you have a web site but you know that it looks like a kid built it — well, maybe it looks like an adult did it who didn’t know what they were doing. Lots of today’s kids would do much better. You know what your web site should look like and even what should be on each page. The first thing you need to decide is where your web pages are going to be hosted. While it is possible to host your web site on your PC, it is definitely not something I would recommend. For one thing, when your computer is turned off, no one could get to your web site. There are also security and performance issues. What you need is a web hosting provider. You will also need a web address so people can find you. While you could use something like www.comcast.net/~mcmahon-4/, it is much easier for people to remember www.mcmahon4.com. The first address is an example of what you might get from your Internet Service Provider (ISP). To get the latter you need to register (and pay) with a licensed registrar. (We recommend GoDaddy.com.) Once you have the web site name and a place to put it, you’ll need the tools to create the web site. We’ll compare a variety of web design programs.

Web hosting
Web hosting packages
Finding and registering a domain name
HTML editors and web site builder tools
How to build a web site in 30 minutes
Web design software