website development tools

[zester]

HI All

I am new to X10 and some what new to web development.

any one know of some good website development tool, to help me make my site, that work good for a sit what will be host on X10.

I was thinking Deamwver CS3 would be good. what do you think?

[souradipm]

Dreamweaver, Frontpage, all are on your computer. I reccommend you get a CMS that's free, because you have easier control (dont have to reupload every update) and you can nominate others to help you, and also you can edit your site from any computer that has internet access and not just those with the program you mentioned.

http://www.opensourcecms.com/ is a site where you can demo different free cms's/blog engines/forum software, etc.

[xxll_martin_llxx]

It depends what you're interested in doing and what tools you're after - you may be after tools that tell you how long your website takes to load, tools to create the website (like your post says/suggests), tools to maintaining your website and so on.

Just a quick google of 'Web development tools' will bring up a few helpful websites for you.

Good luck - be sure to post what you get up to in the Website Review section of the forum!

[componentwarehouse]

I would go for a combination of the 2. A CMS like Joomla is great after youve got a design done and its really easy to maintain and update, but Dreamweaver will make designing the site (or CMS template) a whole lot easier. Of course, if your coding from scratch, Dreamweaver CS3 is the best available in my opinion, but thats reflected in the price so.

Alex

[keeg9]

Dreamweaver can be expensive, i would go with a cms like Joomla! that is what i use.

[perpsgt]

Assuming that you will be doing some scripting / coding other than XHTML, you will most likely want to setup your own local web server to test your code and the like so you don't have to upload to the live server every time you make a change.

[chianghl]

Notepad. Free and readily available on Windows PC, and you don't have to download but the cons are that

- You have to know what code you're writing
- No coloring on the various code that you're writing
- No indentation of codes (May be messy if you are coding the whole site)
- Graphical view of how your web site will turn out to be
- No debugging tools
Edit:
If you are coding your website with PHP and MySQL, I suggest you download the MySQL with the GUI tools. You can generate your MySQL query with the GUI tools easily (Lesser human typo).

Available at: http://www.mysql.com/

[marshian]

Notepad. Free and readily available on Windows PC, and you don't have to download but the cons are that

- You have to know what code you're writing
- No coloring on the various code that you're writing
- No indentation of codes (May be messy if you are coding the whole site)
- Graphical view of how your web site will turn out to be
- No debugging tools
Edit:
If you are coding your website with PHP and MySQL, I suggest you download the MySQL with the GUI tools. You can generate your MySQL query with the GUI tools easily (Lesser human typo).

Available at: http://www.mysql.com/

Instead of Notepad, you can use Notepad++ (http://notepad-plus.sourceforge.net/) which does have code highlighting, usefull plugins etc.

[tnl2k7]

I'd advise Dreamweaver CS3 any day. I'd get Creative Suite 3 as a whole package though; the tools included are really useful. I intend to start toying around in Flash soon, and Photoshop and Fireworks are brilliant when used together to make your web graphics. The bundle from Adobe is well worth the cash if you intend to use all of it.

Code highlighting is really useful, it can highlight PHP/HTML/CSS altogether in one file should you require it.

The WYSIWYG tab provides near-valid code, although you should be prepared to edit the code manually because it does slip up sometimes. But for basic designs that you code by hand later (my tried and trusted method) it works great.

Spry is also pretty good, but I don't like using pre-made components in my sites - I prefer to code it all by hand so I know exactly what's in my sites. It allows you to do a _lot_ of AJAX stuff with no effort. Check out the videos on Adobe's support site to get started with it.

-Luke.