Hi guys,

Im new to web designing and i have some questions before i start to make my own website. I am a bit confuse when i read macromedia dreamweaver and fireworks.

It seems to me that both of these softwares are capable of developing a html and images and they are also wysiwyg software.

Before I prepare my website, what should i consider when it comes to making a choice to select either of this two programs.

Should i first design my page in Photoshop first before I make an import from these softwares?

Is Fireworks a vector based designing software and image manipulation software like photoshop too?

What is the difference? What is the right step when creating a web page?

Hope you guys will help me to decide because I found the similarity in them.

Thank you.

Erm.

Dreamweaver can't create images.Dreamweaver is a wysiwyg html editor.

Fireworks is an image manipulation program (with vector features) geared towards the web with export wizards and such. Macromedia has Freehand, which is a full vector program.

Photoshop is a more advanced image manipulation program (with vector features) that comes with ImageReady which does more or less of what Fireworks can do.

Now the right step, is to create your graphical elements for the page in whatever program you're comfortable with.

Learn (x)html and css and hand-code your website in Dreamweaver or notepad. The export html features of Fireworks and ImageReady produce the most rubbish, table-infested code possible.

first of all thank you for sharing this information. what do you mean by table-infested code? Are they causing any problems to web browser compatibility or bugs to the readers ?

Since Fireworks and image ready produce the most rubbish in codes, is this method the best ? 1) Photoshop > Dreamweaver > handcoding in dreamweaver?

Hello

Tables are for the display of tabular data, they should not be used for layout. You can use CSS to position and style elements of your (X)HTML file.

Dreamweaver is fine to use once you get the hang of (X)HTML, but you should stay away from depending on a WYSIWYG editor. I mean, if you are completely new to all of this, you may be able to learn a few things from DW by creating elements with the WYSIWYG controls and then viewing the code to see how stuff is created.

Learning (X)HTML and hand coding is the way to go. I had my greatest learning experience when I started typing out my code.

Fireworks is for graphics, though it has other features including creating javascript menus, buttons, web templates and so on, but if you export an HTML file with it, there will be alot of nested tables in your file to create the layout that will increase file size and are not really necessary. Plus the code just looks ugly

Johnny

Whatever works for you. Photoshop, Fireworks, Corel Draw... Just don't base your desicion on the code output. These programs are meant to create graphics, not make websites.

I personally use PhotoShop, then skEdit ( http://www.skti.org/skEdit.php ) for coding.

As you will soon see, we're all a bunch of hand-coding nuts here.

should i study html first or xhtml?

Dreamweaver is an expensive solution, so buy it only if you are in for the long haul.

I disagree on you using notepad. I tihnk you should get an html editor with color coding. it helps a LOT. i dont have any names, but search around the forums, you'll find quite a few.

-asT.

astericks, I wasn't being specific. I could name 20 or so editors with color coding/line numbers etc., but all that's really necessary is a plain text editor.

hackwire, there isn't much difference between the two, so why not learn what's in use today? I strongly recommend learning CSS too.

i always have the phobia of learning html or any web language because they always change or upgrades. i can imagine in the future that all this wysiwyg program is going to replace all this languages and anybody can just use it we ease.

before i spent enough time learning this languages which is going to bored me down, i have to know exactly how long it takes to learn all this stuff like css and xhtml?

A wysiwyg program might make things easier, but it will never give you full control over your code, or know how you think.

html and css don't change all the time, and how would a wysiwyg program keep up with the changes even if they did? Compared to server side languages like PHP, ASP, PERL etc, mark-up languages (html, xhtml..) and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS 1, 2..) don't take a long time to learn and are relatively easy.

Another thing with wysiwyg editors is you never know what's actually going on behind the scene, and how html works, and why it does what it does, until you know how to code yourself. Wysiwyg editors seem like a good starting point, and I started off briefly using DW, but now I realise that it would've been much easier to learn how to hand-code from the beginning.

www.w3schools.com is a great place to start.

SitePoint offers a few books on CSS if you prefer learning that way.

I have been building sites since '95 and I am still learning. The point is you can learn the basics in a few days, but you never stop learning new things.

thanks guys. i am determine to go forward to study all the languages and i have started with www.webmonkey.com for html lesson. I find it easier to learn now. Thanks for encouraging me and i do my best now.

I too am a newby to CSS and XHTML. Fairly good at HTML and it was Dreamweaver thast basically taught me most of how it worked in the first place. But DW spits out a whole lot of coding that really should be placed in files that are accessed from another directory on your site. I only use DW for the excellent text editor facilities that it has which I think are second to none.

If you are going to learn CSS and XHTML then you should go to the people who set the standards for the web browsers to follow if you want to learn about it so that your web pages will be W3c compliant. Here is the site where they have every possible aspect of good web design set out in free courses.

W3c schools