Getting Started with Web Design?
If you are faced with
the challenge and excitement of creating or maintaining a web site,
then you have a multitude of options available for you depending on
your interests and budget. Web page design tools range from text
editors with “wizards” to assist with tricky coding like tables or
forms to WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editors that make
creating a page very much like creating a word processing document.
Examples of Text Editors:
- Notepad
– The most basic of all text editors is already installed on your PC.
Notepad will allow you open existing HTML files as well as create new
ones (using the Save As… function) Free – part of Windows - HTML Webmaster 2 –
a text editor with more “bells and whistles” for HTML coding such as
color text for HTML tags, preview window, wizards for creating tables Free (with activation code) FirstPage 2000
– a text editor with similar bells and whistles to Webmaster above.
Allows you to create tags for complex parts of the page more easily
plus preview the page. If you download the FirstTransfer module, you
can also use FTP from the program to upload pages. Free - Dreamweaver
– A multifunction site creator and page editor. Allows for graphical
design of site and pages. Built-in FTP, cascading style sheet editor
and a filter that cleans out extra HTML code left in MS Word documents
saved as web pages. As with most complex software, the interface takes
some time to learn. ~$100 academic price Macromedia - GoLive –
Dreamweaver’s main competitor in high end web site/page design.
GoLive’s strength is in collaborative projects where many designer are
working on the same site. It is also tightly integrated with other
Adobe products such as Photoshop and ImageReady. The interface also
takes some time to learn. ~$80 academic price Adobe: - FrontPage
– Microsoft’s entry into WYSIWYG editors. This integrates with Office
and is a part of the Office XP package. It is easy to use for those
familiar with Microsoft’s interface. The main concern is with the use
of “themes” and other components that do not work with Netscape
Navigator. Part of Microsoft Office XP suite. - Netscape Composer –
Bundled as part of the Netscape Communicator package, Composer is a
free, somewhat basic, WYSIWYG editor that is great for basic web pages.
Composer’s strength is its ease of use. It’s main weakness is in tables
Free.
Graphics
- Photoshop
– This is the tool of choice for web designers. It allows you to edit
photos, resize photos into web ready resolutions, create graphics for
the web and, with ImageReady, create “sliced” graphics and the HTML
tables that can hold them. Photoshop Elements is a lower cost
alternative to Photoshop and can handle most any web graphic job.- Photoshop – $280 academic http://www.adobe.com/photoshop
Photoshop Elements – $50 academic http://www.adobe.com/elements
- Photoshop – $280 academic http://www.adobe.com/photoshop
- PaintShop Pro
– the lower cost alternative to Photoshop. PSP offers many of the same
features as Photoshop as a lower cost. $80 academic – http://www.jasc.com - Irfan View – A
freeware package that gives you several tools for graphics work
including Slideshow, Batch conversion, print options ,Color depth
adjustment ,Scan support ,Cut and crop ,Effects (sharpen, blur,
Photoshop filter factory), JPG rotation Free – http://www.irfanview.com - PowerPoint –
don’t overlook PowerPoint as a quick and dirty way to create graphics
on the fly if you don’t have any other option (or even if you do) Use
the custom slide size to create graphics the size you want and then use
the Save As… option to save in a web ready format.
Helpful Resources
Cooltext.com: an online graphics generator for web pages PSTCC HTML Page Templates – templates to get you started in creating college web pages.
Complete HTML Color Chart – a grid with all of the web safe colors and their values on one page Cool Home Pages – browse hundreds of pages for inspiration and ideas. Getting Started.net – small tutorials and lessons on HTML and web design for beginners. Comments are closed.