Web Design Software

[The Eagle]

'vim', that's what I use.

http://www.vim.org/about.php

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[DeepLurker]

OK looking to do a very, very simple website.

I know there are a fair few people on here who do web design.

Can anyone recommend any free software that is available for me to try out ?

Any updates since 2011 ?

Depends what you mean by 'design'.

If you're happy with a lego box of bits that you stick together: menus, columns, buttons, etc... then Twitter Bootstrap was released in 2011; it's definitely something new! and it's taken the web world by storm.

For 90% of websites, either plain Bootstrap, or one of the 100s of themes based on it - which can be bought for peanuts - is more than adequate.

On the downside, it's not point-and-click work; you'll have to get your hands dirty and write the html yourself (I could be proven wrong and someone has already written a Dreamweaver clone for putting together Bootstrap sites!).

[LiveinHope]

Blue Griffon suit ?

[porca misèria]

'vim', that's what I use.

http://www.vim.org/about.php

The original is still best. Use vi.

vim is for wusses

[gilf]

The original is still best. Use vi.

vim is for wusses

And vi is for idiots, ed is where it's at.

[porca misèria]

And vi is for idiots, ed is where it's at.

Used edt in my first job. With no screen, a visual editor isn't an option.

Still sometimes eschew the luxury of ed and use cat.

[Renewed Investor]

I use Notepad++ for coding, Photoshop for images and Flash for multimedia. The Adobe products are both CS5 and work great.

[davidg]

Is that Ruby on Rails?! I've heard of it but don't know much about it. Industry standard apparently,

Ruby is a programming language, Rails is a framework for rapid development of web sites based on Ruby. A bit like Java and Spring, say. A friend developed Waluu using it:-

http://www.waluu.com/

they handle huge traffic, millions of hits a month (he told me a million hits per day). Not sure you can call RoR an industry standard. There are some performance issues to work around and this seems to have prevented it gaining much traction in the wider world. Hard to find good RoR devs too.

I worked for a web development shop. The process was photoshop for mockups and they had some tool to generate CSS from photoshop but generally the front-end experts spent time with Firefox and Firebug which lets you do a lot of tinkering with HTML, CSS etc. We were generally targetting CMS such as Typo3, Jahia, Liferay etc.

[Guest eight]

Ruby is a programming language, Rails is a framework for rapid development of web sites based on Ruby. A bit like Java and Spring, say. A friend developed Waluu using it:-

http://www.waluu.com/

they handle huge traffic, millions of hits a month (he told me a million hits per day). Not sure you can call RoR an industry standard. There are some performance issues to work around and this seems to have prevented it gaining much traction in the wider world. Hard to find good RoR devs too.

I worked for a web development shop. The process was photoshop for mockups and they had some too to generate CSS from photoshop but generally the graphics experts spent time with Firefox and Firebug which lets you do a lot of tinkering with HTML, CSS etc. We were generally targetting CMS such as Typo3, Jahia, Liferay etc.

Nobody writing HTML in Wordpad then?

[gilf]

Used edt in my first job. With no screen, a visual editor isn't an option.

Still sometimes eschew the luxury of ed and use cat.

Well obviously punch cards is where it's at.

While there were not physically still in use one of the systems I used to work on used batch cards, it was done programatically at the end but originally it was done using a piece of paper and glorified hole punch. I did use it a couple of times to see how it worked.

I think it's actually a shame that people are now so far removed from what makes computers really work. I doubt todays IT students have any real understanding of what's actually going on in there.

[porca misèria]

Well obviously punch cards is where it's at.

Punch cards? Luxury! When I were a lad I had to poke individual bytes of machine code to memory locations, then execute that code.

Thanks for the feeder line I was fishing for

[stormymonday_2011]

Well obviously punch cards is where it's at.

While there were not physically still in use one of the systems I used to work on used batch cards, it was done programatically at the end but originally it was done using a piece of paper and glorified hole punch. I did use it a couple of times to see how it worked.

I think it's actually a shame that people are now so far removed from what makes computers really work. I doubt todays IT students have any real understanding of what's actually going on in there.

IBM still supply the IEBPTPCH utility although it is mainly used for other purposes than processing punched cards nowdays.

Some of us can remember days when paper tape programs could be manually amended by using a little mechanical dibbers (nerves of steel needed for that job).

[davidg]

Punch cards? Luxury! When I were a lad I had to poke individual bytes of machine code to memory locations, then execute that code.

Thanks for the feeder line I was fishing for

PDP 11/34, you toggle the boot sequence in via 12 (I think) flip switches on the front which represent machine code instructions. After setting your 1s and 0s you hit a switch which loaded or executed that byte code then continued with the next instruction.

[Gigantic Purple Slug]

Thanks for everyone who made suggestions.

In the end I went for the Blue Griffon software suggested by Live in Hope.

I managed to put a rudimentary site together which although not so fancy looks clean and will allow the necessary. Maybe at some point I will turn this over to a pro developer, but it at least has helped me get my organisation together and make sure I have all the pictures/text elements I need. If I do turn it over to a pro the blue griffon site will serve as an excellent template for them to tart up.

Much appreciated.

[geezer466]

I have rudimentary HTML and CSS.

I have played with wordpress for a couple of years but decided a couple of Months ago to go the whole hog and bought a genesis framework theme mainly for the mobile responsiveness.

I tinker with my site most days looking to improve the layout and presentation as my knowledge expands.

As its wordpress I tend to use in line css for styling as I have not yet got my head around body classes and how to call elements from the theme stylesheet.

I am always on the lookout for good videos and would welcome any suggestions for CSS and how to apply it in wordpress.

[DTMark]

All my stuff is in .NET so I use Visual Studio for the coding.

However Microsoft have never managed to come up with any form of graphical editor tool which really works and which is nice to use.

The one in Visual Studio is so bad it's useless even though they finally seemed to have fixed the various parsing bugs which used to destroy web pages, so when I need to do page layouts and tweaks, I do that in Dreamweaver which has always been my favourite, it's just so intuitive and lovely to use. It is what I started out with and familiarity is nice, but I haven't yet found anything to match it for layout and design.

Microsoft have a "copy" of that called Expression Studio which isn't a bad effort, but it's just not in the same league.

You can "rent" Dreamweaver on a month to month basis for about £27/mo if you get more serious and want a "heavyweight" tool.