Web design & hosting forum: Building a website?

static website, you could use a program like Dreamweaver, Expression Web, or Kompozer (free).

If you intend to have anything dynamic, I would look at content management systems such as Wordpress (free) or Drupal (free).

~Sovereign

EditPlus is a open source website editor software which you can use to build good website, provided you have sound HTML knowledge.

If your goals are to build websites and/or you are a student of website design, then I would definitely recommend Dreamweaver. If, however, you are a business owner looking save some money on a website, I would suggest re-evaluating effective usages of your time.

Yes, Dreamweaver CS5 is the best in my opinion, but if you are first starting web design dont spend a lot of money. If I were you I would first go to www.w3schools.com which has great referance for most web languages. Also a great book for learning HTML (the language you should learn first) is Smashing HTML5 by Bill Sanders. This book will teach you all the basics of web design. As for your IDE problem I would go with the Dreamweaver trial which can be downloaded from Adobe's website.

Best of luck!

There is a real trend towards moving away from building websites from scratch with programs such as dreamweaver to using content management systems for the layout (cms).

You can build excellent websites from scratch but to make them look good takes a fair amount of skill.

Using a CMS you can get a professional or free theme that does all the design and layout and all you have to do is add content.

WordPress is the most popular system; although it is known as a blogging platform it can be used to build pretty much any website.

There are other systems such as Drupal and Joomla but I have the most experience with WordPress. It is easy and can be extended with forums, shopping carts and about 1000 other addons with "plugins".

Sample some designs here:

http://wordpress.org/showcase/

http://www.woothemes.com/

Note that a CMS based system does require some upkeep as the dynamic nature makes it a more likely target when it comes to hacker attacks.

Check your wordpress security at places such as:
http://www.sucuri.net
http://hackertarget.com/wordpress-security-scan/

These sites provided a quick security check that does not require any installed plugins.

http://wordpress.com provides free sites that you can extend or use just to play with the system.

I have worked with WordPress and it's really very easy to use. I would recommend WordPress. Very dynamic and easy to change if any updating is required.

Well dreamweaver isnt worth all that it costs even though it is pretty sick, all you really need is Notepad and Knowledge to create the website, that is for coding it atleast.

Dreamweaver helps out a lot while designing more and in my opinion some to extent for developing, it just gave you the static web pages and don't gave you the dynamic web pages, There are many new things came in the market which are almost free and you develop your website easily to these platform with a little effort , These source are named as open source platform I used these source to develop my Magento Templates whereas I used Dreamweaver and Photoshop for the designing purpose like Prestashop Themes . If you are unable to used these platform then, I would like t suggest you If you want some thing cheap to develop your website go and get the Templates for your website at cheap and affordable rates, once you get the templates you need to install it and your website would be ready.