Software The software required to customize Website Templates: Before customizing a website template, please mind, that You will need some basic web design knowledge and the supported software for editing: - Macromedia Dreamveawer MX 2004, Microsoft Front Page 2003+ or any other html-editor (for the html-content); - The Adobe Photoshop 6+ (for the images). - Macromedia Flash MX + (for the flash-content); HTML editors: You are acknowledged with web design and decided that the time has come to create your own web-site. Suppose you are acquainted with some mark-up language, but saving your time you’ll certainly use some HTML editor. So the question is which one is better? There are a lot of them, but the modern market offers two major WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) HTML editors that are commonly used. These are: Microsoft FrontPage and Macromedia Dreamweaver. The fact is that many of customers DO use either FrontPage or Dreamweaver and that's the reason the web-designers must be familiar with both. Further both programs will be analised considering different points, based on Internet research and experience of other users. MS FrontPage: 1. FrontPage as all Microsoft products has so many templates and ready to use solutions that you cannot admit it is easier for a beginner to start using FrontPage to build his first website. You can create simple website, personal or business, with several clicks and all you need to do next is to enter your text and pictures instead of used by FrontPage by default. 2. MS FrontPage perfectly interacts with other MS Office products. For example you can easily cut and paste some chart from MS Excel into FrontPage working area. 3. Microsoft application FrontPage is better with ASP pages, which are standard for Windows based hosting and windows based programming. 4. The worst loss of FrontPage html pages is that they look exactly as they appear ONLY in MS Explorer. However you may program FrontPage to get rid of nasty tags but it requires some hand coding to adjust pages to Netscape or Opera. And the good news for FrontPage users: about 93% of all internet clients use MS Explorer 5 and higher. 5. By default MS FrontPage uses table with the fixed width and sometimes it can be a problem to make it display tables with percentage width. Macromedia Dreamweaver: 1. You can build your own templates and use them to edit hundreds of pages of your website with one single click. Although Dreamweaver adds some comment tags to html file to distinguish editable and non-editable areas and I read in one forum that people experience some troubles applying template to more then 700 pages as they ran out of memory but I had never chance to test that. 2. Pages done with Dreamweaver usually have less trash in coding. They look almost perfect with Netscape, Opera and MS Explorer. 3. Dreamweaver doing amazing thing with SSI files and other server side include technology. Php code looks much nicer however with ASP scripts FrontPage still better. 4. Dreamweaver is much better interacts with other macromedia products. 5. Both editors in most cases display CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) correctly. But if you enter style attribute twice in Dreamweaver it will definitely ruin your page and you will be able preview your page partly before this error. FrontPage however handles such mistakes easily. The idea is that MS FrontPage is perfect for beginners as it provides much help and templates, then you cam move to Dreamweaver when you feel yourself more comfortable with the html code and finally, if you are serious about web design, you should reach the hand coding level as it still best way for coding pages. It gives you the freedom of using tags and styles, as you want them to use. Image-editors: Since there are dozens of graphic software programs, You may try to use any, but Adobe Photoshop is the professional graphics-editing software which is a new standard in professional image setup for printing, electronic books and web-publication. It is a Groundbreaking creative tool helping You to achieve extraordinary results and embody Your creative ideas. Due to close interaction with other Adobe software and Adobe Extensible Metadata platform support, Photoshop easily builds into any manufacturing process of creation, processing and publication of informational materials. This unexcelled adaptability enables You to adjust Photoshop to the way You work. All the aforesaid provides You with unlimited abilities for Your self-expression. PSD files are the layered files, made by Adobe PhotoShop. However, this file format has become so popular over recent years, that many other graphic software programs (newer versions) have programmed their software to be compatible with this file format. PSDs give the opportunity of working with images e.g. to change colours of an image, add or remove image layers, etc. Adding text is also easy with the PSD files. Flash editors: Macromedia Flash is a modern technology (multimedia graphics program) currently used in web design. It was created in 1996 by Macromedia, that acquired a vector-based animation software called Future-Splash and later released as Flash 1.0. The distinctive peculiarity of Flash is the use of vector graphics which means that the graphics can be scaled to any size without losing its clarity. Unlike HTML, it is not an open source. Therefore, nearly everyone ranging from beginners to experienced web designers learn how to create and implement Flash in their websites. Some predict that not far is the future, when Flash will replace almost completely the Hyper-Text Mark-up Language (HTML). Since its introduction, Flash technology became a popular alternative tool to create and add animation and enables You to create interactive "movies" or effective presentations on the Web. Flash is commonly used to create animations, advertisements, design elements on the web page, add video to websites and more recently, to develop Rich Internet Applications. The Flash files, that are traditionally called "flash movies", usually have an .swf file extension (.swf files are complete, compiled and published files that cannot be edited with Macromedia Flash.) or fla file extension (.fla files contain source material for the Flash application, they can be edited and compiled into .swf files), and also may appear as an element of a web page or be "played" in the standalone Flash Player.