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Website Design Software Creating a website can feel overwhelming and extremely complicated, especially for anyone who is brand new to the internet and is only now considering developing their own web presence. The first step to presenting your business on the web is developing a website that represents everything you, and your business, stands for in an aesthetically pleasing way.
You want your website to look like a million bucks – but you don’t want it to cost a million bucks.
The answer is to use an HTML editor that is flexible, highly functional, and allows you to easily and simply design a webpage without knowing a single word of HTML or how to program. You can’t even figure out how to program your VCR…so who could expect you to program a website? Well with a Webpage designer, you don’t have to.
In this article, we will review the five most popular and bestselling website design software packages. We’ll provide the current pricing, as well as the pros and cons for each. Use this guide to decide which Website Design software is right for you.
Netscape Composer
Netscape Composer remains one of the most popular website design software packages in use. The functions that composer is capable of includes the basics - creating tables, editing text, inserting pictures, and creating web links. It is similar to the Dreamweaver software, however much more limited. Composer doesn’t have quite as many panels that assist with navigating through the webpages that you create, so it’s a little more difficult to edit larger pages or larger websites with multiple pages. There is no image editing functionality built into Composer, so all photos that are inserted into the webpage need to be sized and formatted accordingly ahead of time. However Composer is very simple and easy to use for the beginner.
Cost: FREE Difficulty: Easy
DreamWeaver
The Dreamweaver webpage editor is very similar to Netscape Composer, except that there is much more functionality. Dreamweaver features a number of panels that make navigating and editing webpages much faster. With Dreamweaver, it’s a breeze to locate and edit font, hyperlinks, and tables. Dreamweaver provides web designers with the ability to edit photos using Macromedia Fireworks – which is a tremendous benefit and a convenience, because you can edit and format your photos from within the same development environment where you are building your website. Dreamweaver provides a webpage designer with a big more functionality through the use of layers and frames.
Cost: $250 to $300 Difficulty: Moderate
MS Office FrontPage
MS Office Frontpage is a web authoring tool that seeks to compete with the likes of Dreamweaver and other web design software at about half the cost. Unfortunately, since its creation, FrontPage has always received poor reviews from website designers. Even the latest version of the software has received terrible reviews. In general, the background html produced by FrontPage is considered to be quite atrocious – probably the messiest and least efficient HTML to be found anywhere on the internet. Unfortunately Microsoft attempted to design a Web Authoring tool that focused on Microsoft proprietary components like defaulting to windows-1252 Microsoft encoding font instead of the typical standard UTF-8 Unicode. Additionally much of the formatting is designed for Internet Explorer, and other browsers don’t seem to display the formatting quite right. However the one positive note for FrontPage is that it is just as easy to use as Netscape Composer.
Cost: $100 to $180 Difficulty: Easy
Adobe Fireworks
Adobe Fireworks is a high-end web design software package that offers web designers the ability to create and optimize images for the web. The software also has the ability to put together Web sites and Web applications fairly quickly and painlessly. Fireworks CS3 features the ability to edit vector and bitmap images, and it’s integrated with Adobe Photoshop CS3 for easy image editing. Mostly used for its powerful imaging capabilities, designers typically move the components developed in Adobe Fireworks over to Dreamweaver CS3 to develop the overall website.
Cost: $250 to $300 Difficulty: Moderate
SiteSpinner
SiteSpinner is a very inexpensive alternative to Dreamweaver, and it offers more functionality than Composer and FrontPage. SiteSpinner is extremely easy to use, but it offers amazing drag-and-drop technology that allows you to position text, images, and other objects exactly where you want them to be on the webpage. With the editing functionality and integrated graphics capabilities, SiteSpinner is one of the few moderately priced software packages that truly help beginners design professional web pages.
Cost: $49 Difficulty: Easy
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