Member Avatar for HMB

Hi,

I am very NEW to all of this, but was suggested by a friend to try this site for help & feedback.
I recently opened up my own business, & I basically do everything and anything to save $$$, including my own website. It's very basic, but now I am looking to up the look & design(way up). I was interested in Studio 8. My wife is highly interested in designing our site. Can anyone give me feedback on this program? Is it worth the $$. Does the program include everything necessary to design all aspects of a site? Or am I treading down waters I shouldn't be??

Any help is greatly appreciated!!! :confused: :?:

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  • Latest Post Latest Post by jtbnet
Member Avatar for DaveSW

Web design can be done with tools which are free. If you want to become a good web designer then purchasing Macromedia tools will not necessarily make you one.

Dreamweaver for instance is simply a program which generates html code. HTML code is easy to learn and can be written quickly and very efficiently by hand. See my website for an example - www.emdevelopments.co.uk - this was written using html-kit from www.chami.com - a free program. If you view the source on it then you'll see it's almost plain english.

Graphics programs are harder to find for free, but www.gimp.org offers a quite good one. Or you could pay something like £100 for Paint Shop Pro - a full image editor, free trial from jasc.com, though it's now taken over by Corel, so the address may have changed.

Flash file creation can't be done for free, but for a small fee www.koolmoves.com (free trial again) can be used - it's easier to use and a lot cheaper.
Swish is another popular flash authoring tool. Many people find flash overly complicated and difficult to learn e.g. motion tweens and layering can be very frustrating.

I'd suggest you try the free demos, and decide how much return you're likely to get on your investment - if you're not likely to get many customers (at least at first) then it might be worth doing the work using free tools - so that your first few jobs aren't spent exclusively paying for your software...

Member Avatar for businesscards

If you really want I will make you a 7-20 page web site for free. Contact me with any q's. business_card_man@yahoo.com
We sell business cards, envelopes and letterheads. We can make CD (arrrgh I can't remember how they are called) things and we now offer web site design

Member Avatar for businesscards

I will also sell ad space

Member Avatar for mdvaldosta

Dreamweaver is definately the way to go for you.

Member Avatar for jtbnet

In Universitys and small business they use Studio - Can save time once your used to it - try the 30 day free trial and then have a look at some of the tutorials to get you started.

Regards.

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