More On Websites and Design

Sorry it's been a while since I posted, was sick last week and I'm just now getting caught up on everything!

So last we spoke we were discussing the Navigation on your websites. Hopefully you have mapped out your website on paper and you have a pretty good idea of what you want the site to look like. This week I really think I should discuss with you the various programs that you would benefit from.

Adobe Photoshop is my favorite program for editing photos. You can also use Photoshop to create and publish websites... Below are some pro's and con's for Photoshop, we'll start off with the good...

Photoshop Pro's:

• Photoshop has SOOO many tools that will allow you to do pretty much ANYTHING with a photo.
• Photoshop allows users to convert photos into various types of extensions (jpg, gif, bmp, png, etc.)
• You can create animated graphics
• There are literally THOUSANDS of brushes available for FREE download to help you achieve different looks
• There are THOUSANDS of actions available for FREE download to help change pictures and achieve certain effects with the click of a button.
• There are thousands of free tutorials to help you achieve certain effects.

Photoshop Con's:

• Photoshop is quite complex and can be difficult to maneuver in if you are not familiar with it
• Photoshop is quite expensive
• Photoshop takes up a large amount of space and you must clear out your temporary files frequently to prevent your computer from slowing down
• The built in tutorials are not always helpful to beginners.

So others most likely have more Pros and Cons for Photoshop but these are the main ones that I personally see. Me personally... I am a HUGE fan of Photoshop... but I have also taken classes and read books to learn new techniques. If you are new to Photoshop I highly recommend at least reading a book. Watching YouTube videos is also a very easy way to learn how to do things in Photoshop.

Now that we've discussed my favorite photo-editing software, let's move on to some options for your website (Photoshop WILL make web pages, but I don't use it for that). There are several WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) programs that allow you to see what you are designing as you design it. Publisher, Front Page, (Photoshop) and I am sure there are several others. My personal favorite is Dreamweaver. Dreamweaver is another Adobe program (no I'm not their spokesperson... but maybe I should be :). Dreamweaver and Photoshop are actually available for purchase together as part of a web premium suite along with Flash (we will get into Flash in a different post), Illustrator (another photo editing software that I have never used but have heard great reviews on), Firework (never used that one) and a couple other programs. It is pretty pricey but may be worth it if you need the programs, just keep in mind that all of the programs together take up a LOT of space on your computer.

OK Now on to Dreamweaver :) Dreamweaver is a web program that allows you to see the coding view of your page (it looks like Notepad II with color coding) along with the design mode (WYSIWYG). This split view is a lifesaver when you are first starting out. If you don't know how to write HTML code, you can build your page totally in the design view. The downside to this is that sometimes Dreamweaver THINKS it knows what you want and will change your coding and sometimes that coding doesn't come across well in the web browser, so I highly recommend learning SOME coding at the very least so you can fix the coding errors. The other benefit to Dreamweaver is that you have the option of previewing your page in an internet browser.

***Let me stop right there and add this comment... I highly recommend downloading the latest version of Internet Explorer and AT LEAST Mozilla FireFox. If you CAN download Safari and Google Chrome that is even better!! The reason for this is that there are times when your website may look perfectly fine in Internet Explorer, but won't load in one of the other browsers. There are times when certain areas of your web page will not function in Internet Explorer but function perfectly in one of the other browsers. For this reason you should test in as many browsers as you can, and on as many different platforms as you can (Windows, Linux or Mac). ***


OK just to recap, for editing your photos I recommend Adobe Photoshop and for building your web page I recommend Adobe Dreamweaver. I will go into more detail about getting started in Dreamweaver in another post.