The Reminder is making its archives back to 2003 available on our website. Please note that, due to technical limitations, archive articles are presented without the usual formatting.
Five years ago, people who were web designers had some sort of magical knowledge. The ability to write raw computer code and have it magically turned into a classy, well-designed website was an amazing talent that few possessed. This isn't true anymore. A lot of teenagers have websites, schools, small businesses, and communities have sites. A presence on the web these days is almost mandatory, and it's never been easier. Most people that design web sites have a specialized piece of software for this purpose. Macromedia's Dreamweaver, Microsoft's Frontpage, and Adobe's GoLive are the major three on the market. Besides personal preference, the three are close to each other. The other advantage of buying one of these pieces of software is that they are part of a suite. For example, Dreamweaver is completely compatible with Flash, Freehand, and Fireworks. The three together are a powerful set of that work together seamlessly. The one disadvantage of these suites is price. A full suite of web design programs will run $600 - $1,200. The other option is to collect free software and tools. If you have a Windows machine, you can simply use WordPad. A lot of people use it for a simple word processor, but this program is actually meant to be an html editor. If you use an editor program, this means that you need to learn to write html. This is the one huge disadvantage of using these types of programs. The other suites are what is called WHYSIWYG (What You See is What You Get) programs. You can see your site as you build it. Using an editor, you can't see it until you check to see what it looks like. While writing html isn't easy, there are a lot of places on the Internet you can use to learn html and that will give you samples of code that you can try out. W3schools.com is one of the most comprehensive sites on the net both for people learning code and for those more experienced. At this site you can get tutorials and samples of code for your own use. You can simply save the code and then modify it. Another two excellent places online are htmlgoodies.com and dynamicdrive.com. These two sites are code vaults; sites filled with code samples that you can work on and then use them for your own site. If you are really looking to spice up a site you will also need to work with something like Flash. This vector animation software is the standard for making things like small online games and ads. Flashkit.com is the place to head for samples of what you can do with Flash. While these pieces of software can be complex to learn, they are definitely worth the investment of your time if you want to produce a first class site. So you basically have three choices if you want to work on web design. The first is to set up shop somewhere that gives out free webspace and free tools to build a simple site. This is what a lot of teenagers do. The second choice is to collect a stable of free tools and learn to do things the hard way, by writing raw code. Your third and final option is to spend the money on a suite and work with it to create what you want. Depending on the amount of time and money you have, and what you want to do, choose your option. ([email protected])
