Which website design software to use?

[alecsing]

I need a software that can create CSS Layouts without doing any coding from my part. Also the software should be easy to use.

Can u suggest any software which meets my requirements?

Please help me!

[physics]

Note: moved from Webmaster General.

Any ideas CSS peeps?

[PerlJamZ10]

If you wana be a good designer your gonna havta know CSS. That's a given and it's not even that hard. Use Dreamweaver because then you can create websites by manually placing everything onto a workspace (called "design mode") where you can work with images and visual stuff like that, while still having the option to work with the HTML coding ("code mode"). But then your still gonna wana know some CSS in case you wana make universal changes to all your webpages without having to edit each page individually. And I don't know of any program that let's you make CSS without having to code...Dreamweaver at least helps you along with the coding if you have some idea of how the format looks.

[edited by: PerlJamZ10 at 5:58 am (utc) on Dec. 20, 2006]

[Fotiman]

I've heard good things about Microsoft's new Expression Web
[microsoft.com...]

And there's a free trial download (but I have yet to try it myself).

[Intensity]

The new Dreamweaver supports CSS style sheets. It is easy to catch on. It will save you alot of trouble trying to get the web design right. Check out
[w3schools.com...]

[cmarshall]

There's a few Mac tools that I've played around with.

However, like DW's good WYSIWYG editor, I've drifted back towards hand-coding.

I suspect it will be a few years before CSS is ready for true "point and click" editing. The browser incompatibilities are just WAY too nasty. I spend twice as much time debugging CSS as I spend writing it.

For that, I need a text editor and some test browsers. Presentation simulations (like DreamWeaver's) are completely worthless, if not downright dangerous. You need to actually test the CSS in your target browsers.

The WebDeveloper Toolbar [chrispederick.com] for Firefox is amazing. It allows you to edit the CSS for ANY site, in-place. Great learning tool.

I would suggest starting with DW's stylemaker, and then tweaking by hand; either with DW's text editor, or an external one. I actually prefer using DW's editor over BBEdit (my usual editor), because it has better support for hinting.

However, you have GOT to test with multiple browsers. There's absolutely no substitute for that.

A basic rule of thumb for me is the same as I use for graphic layout: Put it all in, then keep removing things until you are at the bare minimum you need to support. This tends to deliver very good, simple, robust, compatible code.

That W3School link is great. They let you try out the CSS in place.