IMO, Adobe Photoshop is one of the best image-editing tools that the vast majority of web designers use for designing elegant site layouts and all... END OF MESSAGE
I know a designer who designs his web pages in Corel Draw. I think it's not the best solution and I wouldn't work in it. What do you think about Corel Draw used for web design?
"Suggest if you use anything else.." I would include PaintShop among the options. It is a great software that has greatly evolved since its beginnings, and I use it more than PhotoShop.
Photoshop is fantastic bitmap editing software. But for Web site design, Fireworks is the best, hands down. It has phenomenal vector tools, very respectable bitmap editing capabilities (a notch below PS), the best export engines and by far the most intuitive, friendly interface. If FW could handle CMYK and Pantone color pallettes, I would never purchase an Adobe product again. Oh wait, adobe bought Macromedia. Well you get what I'm saying As for the coding part, I have a long established love affair with Homesite. Yes, even though it does not understand how to save a document with UTF-8 character encoding (there are workarounds), it's still my one and only HTML editor.
I use Photoshop mostly as it has the most features and it works best...Sometimes I'd use Fireworks and Photoshop together because there are just somethings that can be done so much easier in Fireworks than in Photoshop.
I believe the question was, "Which software do you use for creating web layouts?" The creation is done with the MarkI, mod0 human brain. My hardcopy interface is a number 2 pencil on any handy piece of paper. I kinda favor grocery sacks as a source. Using my trusty sidekick, Emacs, I mark up the supplied content or some lorem and block out the design with css. With a prototype in hand, colors, fonts, and background images are decided on, and except for the bg images, everything is finished up with css and a structural change or two in the html. Meanwhile, the graphics lady develops the required design element images. We don't need the bg images 'til the last, since the images support the design, not vice versa[1]. She uses Photoshop when on her Mac, and The Gimp when on my Debian box. But, the design is not created in PS, only design elements. cheers, gary [1] An image bound design is a print holdover. The web is not print.