I am a website designer and an artist and I am wondering what people think would help them to design their website. What programs work and what don't. What information whould help you? Let me know. Thanks

I'd say it depends heavily on your skill, experience, and goals. My mom would need a WYSIWYG editor, while I only need a graphics program and a text editor. Other more advanced designers can probably design a website in their minds and then dump out the code via a neural interface of some kind. =)

I prefer to use a dual code and WYSI(almost)WYG editor like dreamweaver. Sometimes coding away seems kinna silly when you can do it faster visually, sometimes sticking to purely visual can cause you to spend alot of your time fighting the software you are using.

I used to do that when I spent more time making designs from scratch. Now I just make the template file one time and only touch the markup for slight tweaks. Also I prefer to define web "design" as the actual creative process of designing the layout, not the monkey work of coding the markup.

hmm, didnt think about it that way, thats a good point, though I was more continuing on the lines of your recent post as far as preffered software

Interesting: A friend of mine is programing a plug in for HTML Kit 2 that will creat a web site in laymens terms with out all the bull; you get what you tell it you want

For the basic layout I normally use ImageReady to create what I want. It also makes creating rollovers etc. much easier. After that I code the site myself. I'm still learning web design and the best way is to to everything yourself.

I never really got used to WYSIWYG programs, so I stick to good old Notepad for the coding.

Good example of using code vs software:

I was building a page that displays a table of images (not embedded/ just using the path) from a mysql database. I use dreamweaver and the software has a function called Repeat region. Which allows you to set a dynamic variable and the software writes a do/while loop (I am using PHP) to repeat it throughout the recordset. For example you would contruct a row displaying each of properties in your record set then use the repeat region function to display the entire table. Anyways, I made a table that constructed of a single cell with the image and the image title in it. Then attempted to repeat this in the horizontal and vertical directions, or horizontal with line breaks when it fills the screen. But their function isnt capable of this. You cannot use the function twice to get the software to write nested loops. After fighting with the software for quite a while I realized it was impossible and was forced to simply write the two nested loops myself (one around table and one around td). This didnt take but a few minutes and I could have saved time by not fighting the software, making code better suited for this case. But at the same time if I wanted to just show all of the images vertically, then I could draw the table and use the repeat function with a few clicks, making the software more effictient.

Even though I have a great deal of experience programming in C, I still prefer to visually create websites, it just seems faster and easier, but this obviously doesnt always work. I think that anyone could create a website if they were well versed in a visually based software like dreamweaver, while learning at least a small amount about programming in case the need arises.

goodness that was lengthy...

I sometimes feel like making a website is too easy. =0

I am creating some information to make websites easier and cheaper to make and was wondering if you guys and gals at Caedes would be interested?

interested in what exactly?