Web Design All-in-One for Dummies®

Chapter 4. Choosing the Right Tools

In This Chapter

• Using a Web editor (HTML versus WYSIWYG)

• Choosing the right graphics software

• Understanding HTML basics and code structure

• Using color effectively on the Web

• Choosing the right shopping cart for your e-commerce site

• Determining when to hire a programmer

By now you should have pulled together and organized all (or most of) the content required for the site, and you're nearly ready to begin working on the site design. Before you can do that, however, you must first make a few important decisions about which development tools to use. After that, you need to be sure that you understand some fundamental techniques for using those tools.

You begin this chapter by discovering the basics of coding and working with HTML. You can hand-code your pages using a simple text editor, or even better, you can build your pages with some kind of HTML or Web editor. Although not all Web-editing programs insist that you know HTML before you use them, having a simple understanding of HTML's structure and syntax can definitely help you build the pages for the site more quickly and efficiently. It's important, too, that you understand how to save your HTML files using the proper naming conventions and correct file extensions.

After you've selected your Web-editing tool, you need to look into and purchase (or download a free copy of an open-source application) at ...