I'll make this short and sweet - if you can afford Adobe Photoshop and have the time to invest in learning it, use it. But understand the following - it's a big piece of software that's a career path, and learning it well will take months. If you don't have the time, use one of the other choices ahead. Pricewise it's not bad for educators; currently $299.00 from Adobe. But that's still a lot of money, so be sure. And if you're going to spend that much, you should opt for the Adobe Creative Suite, which includes Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe InDesign, Adobe GoLive, and Adobe Acrobat Professional for only $100 more. Even if you only use Acrobat, it's worth it. InDesign is the new version of Pagemaker, Illustrator is excellent and GoLive is their graphical Web authoring system. But oh the time it will take to learn all this. Free demos are available at www.adobe.com.
Photoshop Elements can do a lot of the above, and I've seen it for $50 at Costco. I may soon use it along with GraphicConverter on my Mac.
Macromedia sells this program as part of its Studio MX 2004 package, and if you've decided to get that then spend the time to learn it. It's excellent for Web graphics. Not nearly as powerful as Photoshop, but plenty good enough.
A previous student was an online instructor for this program and really talked it up. I don't use Windows, so have no direct experience, but many people in the online community swear by it. They also have a suite of tools, including animation and many plugins. Acadmic price at CreationEngine is $65, which is much better than Photoshop. Free demo available at http://www.jasc.com/.
I love this program. It's all I use now for Web graphics, even though I own Fireworks and Photoshop. This program started out as a "Swiss Army Knife" for file formates, but now includes enough editing tools to convert graphics to the Web. I'll admit the Fireworks does amazing things, but I have not got the time to learn it. My Photoshop is better, but still rusty. This is the one I use most. It costs $30, and a demo is available from http://www.lemkesoft.de/en/graphcon.htm.
At this point in class you are free to use any software package you wish for creating Web pages. Your choices vary widely in power and expense, and I’d like to give you my thoughts on how to choose. Or, you may not have a choice, in which case you can skip to the next issue.
I like to start cheap and work my way up. For free there are a couple of nice options that will see you through being at least a middle level author. You can choose to continue to enter code or use a graphical editor and not pay money.
Continue to use Notepad or SimpleText. Seriously. A lot of professional Web authors only use these tools, preferring to have total control over the code of their site. Sure, this is the hard way to do it, but you can’t beat the price. And the more HTML you learn, the more proficient you will be at Web design, no matter what package you use.
Download Netscape Communicator and use the free HTML page program Composer. This is a nice enough graphical option for making Web pages. You really don’t have to enter any HTML code; Composer works like a Word Processor, and even has a way to FTP your site from within it.
This is not to say Composer is without faults. There are a lot of quirks to the program and the code it generates is very ugly. One of my biggest beefs is that it defaults to inserting the <br> tag when you hit return, rather than the more normal <p> tag.
You may wish to look at Composer if you will be teaching or using the Web in a environment with little money. It is free, and with a little work can be used for small Web sites.
For those who remember old software, Composer is much like Adobe Pagemill and Claris HomePage. Because it is free, it actually ran them out of business which is a shame, because they were much better.
If you use Windows, there is the radical nerd fringe with a couple of nice programs. One is HTML-Kit; it’s basically a text editor but has a lot of menu options and toolbars dedicated to making Web pages. You still enter html code, but can preview your work without going to a browser.
Also on Windows (and Mac OS X) is Amaya, a free editor/browser from the World Wide Web Consortium. W3C is the outfit that sets the language standards for the web, and Amaya is their demonstration/test bed. It has a lot of interesting and advanced powers, but I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone but the most techno-savy amongst you. But do keep it in mind.
Power tools are those text editors that have been beefed up with HTML tool palettes and other programming niceties. These are often used along with the powerful Web editors like Dreamweaver and Frontpage. They are commercial pieces of software, but offer educational discounts.
Macromedia bought HomeSite because it was so good and they used it as an extension for Dreamweaver. Most Windows authors use this product; it’s full of features that make code entry and debugging fast and clean. But nowadays it's probably not worth buying it alone unless you're sure you'll never but the Dreamweaver Studio.
BBEdit is a Macintosh programmer’s text tool, but over the years it has greatly concentrated on adding powerful HTML extensions. Tags may be added by clicking on a floating palette, and modified using dedicated tools with listed options. The search and replace system for BBEdit is incredibly useful, allowing you to search and replace in entire folders at one time. BBEdit is used as an extension for Dreamweaver on the Mac.
This class of product goes beyond making individual Web pages and takes on the entire process of managing a Web site. This means maintaining a site structure, including an FTP client inside the program and providing for site synchronization. A good Site Editor allows you to move files into different directories and then corrects all the links to that page site-wide. Anyone running a medium to large site will eventually want one of these packages. Oh, and they do a great job making Web pages too.
Dreamweaver is available for Windows and Mac, and is currently the industry standard. Most reporting firms say it has about 70% of the market. It has a full feature Web page editor that generates fairly clean HTML code, and allows easy editing of that code if necessary. This is the one to buy if you are trying to decide. It is best purchased as part of the Web Design Studio MX 2004, which includes Fireworks (web graphics), Flash (web animation) and Freehand (vector graphics). The suite costs about $183 for the academic version from ODU’s computing center. A free 30 day functional demo is available from www.macromedia.com.
GoLive CyberStudio is a direct competitor to Dreamweaver, and has a small but insistent following. I do not know the program much, but designers say it is a great choice for someone who knows PhotoShop very well, as it uses all of Adobe’s conventions. My take is that it is always a half a step behind Dreamweaver, but that may not be fair. A free 30 day functional demo is available from www.adobe.com.
This product has never had the standing of the above two packages. I only know the older versions of it, but they were obscure and, well, not very good. But it is the standard in a lot of places and you can make it work if that’s your choice. The Mac version is still terrible, but I hear the Windows is better. But I'd only use this if I had no other choice.
I am on a Mac, and use Dreamweaver MX for making agenda pages and maintaining my site, though I do a lot of HTML programming in BBEdit as well. For graphics I most often use a little utility called GraphicConverter for simple image editing, but am learning Fireworks and can see it becoming more important. Flash is the holy grail to me, but again, there's not enough time right now to learn it.
Last modified
Thursday, April 13, 2006 9:56 AM
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