[WillUK]

Hi,

The firm I work for has offered to purchase some design software. This is something that I have little experience of, as up to now I've literally hard coded everything using notepad, paintbrush and content that clients have submitted to me directly. This means that my sites have so far lacked 'rich' design content. Bu hopefully that will change with this investment!

I am tempted by Dreamweaver, but there are so many different packages to choose from at varying costs:

Design Premium, Design Standard, Web Premium etc etc etc

Please could someone offer advice on what I should choose? Is Dreamweaver the right option or am I looking in the wrong place?

I want to be able to add exciting, rich, colourful content/images to my sites. That is the aim...

Cheers

[wirehopper]

Software won't make the site beautiful.

I recommend finding a template you like and customizing it. There are so many templates and so many sites that your site should still look unique. You'll save yourself a lot of money and time.

An image editor would be good - something like PhotoShop or Paint.Net. Also - go to Flickr.com and other image sharing sites for images. Choosing images with a 'Creative Commons' license, for commercial use, and allowing derivative works means you can modify and use the image as long as you give credit to the artist. Many sites use this approach.

Hand coding is an advantage - you have complete control of the page.

Good luck.

[WillUK]

thank you Wirehopper...that's really good advice

[Thechecker12]

I like Dreamweaver. However, wirehopper is right, an extraordinary template is what you really need. It is not sufficient to use Dreamweaver as a package like everyone else does. To make your page unique, there is more to do. If you don't want to purchase Photoshop, you can also use Gimp as an image editor. This is free and has (nearly) the same features than Photoshop.

[sahaya]

you can try this site http://www.thewebpole.com/twp/website-tonight/ to create a new web site. it provides templates to create a site. its very easy method of creating a website. it provides templates at cheap rates.

[nickiee]

There are so many type of design softwares, you can use paint,photoshop and also dreamweaver. all these softwares are very good for website designing and will help you alot.

good luck

[JohnnySaur]

When it comes to designing my site I use this environment such as Adobe Photoshop for images, Fireworks for the graphics and Dreamweaver for the syntax.

[Phoumano]

If your company is willing to spend. I highly recommend going with Adobe Creative Suite 5.5 Design Premium. The bundle will give you full agency studio capabilities from print > web > video. You will be able to do it all. These are the tools to get.

[Niall]

As people have said before, web design software won't necessarily improve the looks of your site, but it will probably speed up development.
If you do continue using notepad, I would highly recommend Notepad++. It's basicly like notepad, but it's written for coders so it does things like colouring parts of the text to help you identify different functions, etc. It can make your code much easier to read/scan through. It's also free.

[luckysophie]

now, i am using Dreamweaver cs5, i think it is very good.
Function is very powerful, and very simple to operate.