I take it you mean for just making a preview on how you want the site to look? As I think some people are a little unclear on this looking at some of your replys. I dont my design skills suck I tend to just make a quick layout on paper then make the graphics in PSP and coding in code veiw in Dreamweaver XHTML/HTML, CSS and the odd bit of PHP sometimes too. My graphics skills are soooo bad. Oh yeah anybody else notice the results of this poll? 60% Photoshop 60% Others Hmmm 120% that really make sence.
This is multiple choice pole, so one can click on more than one option too. As one designer uses both Photoshop as well as FireWorks both.
I code and change the design/layout of my own home-site "by hand" (and especially not with help of templates or WYSIWYG-type of programs); all that with an awesome tabbed and "multi-file-open-at-once" EditPad Lite program from "JGSoft" site. tayiper
I consider photoshop is best option for designing web layouts. The save for web option is great. PS has its own rhythm of making designs.
if only that "save for web" option exported to CSS, it would be sooo awesome, the tables are so very disgusting, then again, there are quite a few designers who dont want anything but looks, even though there sites take too much time to load, ugh 10-20 seconds for a site, YUCK, Internet users are impatient, well i know i am, who agrees with me?
I agree with you! Cascading Style Sheets are boon for web designers. But at the same time we can't avoid using images. I always use sliced images in header part and reduce the use of images in body and footer. Some special effects in design can't be replaced with CSS.
I use notepad++ to PHP, html and css. usualy i use one image wich is the logo... the rest is css...but thats kind of limitated... sometimes i ask my gf to do me some stuff on photoshop. my graphics skills are not bat, they just dont exist. I dont even know how to open an image in photoshop and scale it. I use dreamweaver to generate automatic code... like forms. I go on the design view... insert the elements i want and then cop paste into my file its faster than typing it. maybe this thread is not for me... i am a scripting guy... not a designer.
However you are scripting guy, but you ultimately generates the layout of the site so its your thread. Now, I think, I should add Dreamweaver and other HTML editor should also added in the options.
Coreldraw, Illustrator. The above are vector based softwares. For making html pages I only suggest Dreamweaver. WYSWYG editor. For learning generation of html codes dreamweaver is very friendly. For graphic making and editing try photoshop. I suggest design all your logos and icons in vector format so that it can be resized without loosing quality of the images. If you are good enough in writing hrml codes the notepad will solve the purpose.