Guest Author - Stephanie L. Watson
Today there are a lot of tools you can use when designing your website. You're no longer need to know a lot of different coding languages, in fact you can build a pretty good website today without knowing anything about code. Instead you can concentrate on how you want the site to look instead of the technical code behind it. Here are some awesome tools you can use to help you design your website.
Artisteer
This is a web design program that will automate creating templates for a Varity of different platforms including Wordpress, HTML, Joomla and other CMS products. You can create templates visually quickly and easily. There is little to no learning curve on creating templates using this software. But you will need to know something to be able to use the templates once it's created.
Wordpad
You can use Wordpad to edit HTML, CSS or any type of language. Simply cut and paste the code into Wordpad and edit away. Not as fun as other HTML editors but it is free with Word and it works. You need to know a lot about coding or at least know how to reverse engineer the code to work with Wordpad.
Gimp
An open source graphic image manipulation program. This means it is free, and you can download it and use it free. If you can use other graphics programs it is likely you can figure out how to use Gimp. You can also watch tutorials and see all the documentation on the Gimp website.
Adobe Photoshop
A lot like Gimp only probably better since it is not a free software, this is a photo manipulation tool that you can use to edit photographs, create vector art, cool text effects and more. Many people use adobe to design their website layout.
Wordpress
Wordpress is an open source platform that you can use to design beautiful, dynamic websites and entire content management systems. By using a Wordpress template you can easily create visually appealing website designs. The learning curve is pretty fast, and there are many step-by-step tutorials on the website.
Adobe Dreamweaver
Adobe is an advanced website designing software development tool. While you will be told that this website is simple to use, and anyone can do it, you do need to know more than the basics of FTP, HTML, and general knowledge of using various software to develop and design websites. It's not impossible to learn, but expect to have a medium learning curve. Watch their free tutorials too!
