Tools for building a webpage?

HybridHB

HybridHB

New member
I really love the layout of Rage3d, but what was used to make it? Im new to building websites and need to build one fast. I have Dreamweaver MX and like it, although im not good with it. Also, what programs do you guys use to make logos and little icons for the buttons? I have illustrator, photoshop, and image ready. Those 3 seem to be editing tools and not drawing tools. Any suggestions? I know that was a lot of questions in a dribble fashon, sorry!
 
well illustrator is a drawing tool. Photoshop is a editing/drawing tool, and Imageready is a tool that comes with photoshop in emhpasis to web/animated stuff.

You can use DreamweaverMX to make a site like Rage3D. You could use alot of things. It just depends on how much you know certian aspects of it. You could use frontpage for gods sake if you know what you were doing... You could use notpad or pico, VI, or EMACS if you really wanted to. For instance rage3d has alot of Perl, html, and PHP.... You pretty much write that stuff from scratch with the help of something like DreamweaverMX to make it easier on yourself. I'll bet the graphics were all done with adobe products like the 2 you have installed... (just a guess as most people use adobe) But you could use just about anything you wanted to. Macromedia producs have good support for debugging many different languages. Adobe is what most people use for graphics. (namely photoshop)

What i'm trying to say here is nothing just runs off and makes it for you 'quick like' for a site like Rage3d. Granted some aspects like the forum only took setting it up and picking out colors...(I guess a bit of modding) not all of it is a program you can just buy and install. It takes time and experiance to do these things. Some people will sit there and write pl scripts all day while somebody else writes php scripts while someobdy else draws graphics..... It just all comes together with sites like this with time, work, knowhow, and having that 'eye' to know what looks good and works well. If you talk to anybody that does this stuff all the time. They will pretty much tell you thier sites get more advanced, better looking and easier to use with every site they make. My last one basically ended up being 3.1 gigs of 'text'. ASP, PHP, PL and such. I still havn't entirely gotten into the whole graphics things worked into it other than its foundation/template yet and it took me almost 7 months to write. I use anything and everything, it really doesn't matter to me since I do most debugging on the server, in my head, and during its deployment.

The worst part is when your almost done and your sick of it.... Or the day after when you already know what your going to do different next time.

Just sit down there with dreamweaver and start making them... You'll eventually get the html part and then move into the better parts later. Don't expect too much right away. It takes time.
 
Wow thanks for the good reply. I must be dumb, but i dont see any drawing features of any of thos eprograms. such as i dont see the tool to draw simple circles!
 
in what? Photoshop Imageready and illustrator it's called the ellipse tool. On all 3 they are on the tool menu right hand side 5 or 6 tools down. Click on the tools and they will expand to more tools that fit into the same category. Your probably going to have a wierd time at first with things like photoshop and image ready dealing with what's called layer masks, but you'll soon get the hange of them. Illustrator is object oriented and better for doing things like 'drawing a circle' or drawing anything all together. Depending on what versions you have. Photoshop/imageready works seamlessly with with Illustrator so you can pretty much just jump back and forth doing things. Older versions of Illustrator do not like photoshop at all really. ironic I know. I get the latest publishers suites sent to me by my licence with adobe so I havn't had the problem in years now. But I do remember hating it back in the day.

Keep playing, it will all come together eventually, once you learn one adobe product, the rest are always layed out almost exactly the same every time and it will be much easier to grasp newer and different products.
 
I used Corel Draw 9 to draw the shapes for the main logo, and Photoshop to work with those shapes afterward (I exported to Illustrator first, then "copied" the paths and "pasted" to Photoshop since you can't copy from draw to photoshop - Draw is far superior to Illustrator IMHO).

I created all the icons, buttons, gradients and whatnot in Photoshop.

I built the actualy page using Homesite 5.0. The layout is controlled by PHP, whereas the News script is generated with CGI (everything will be controlled by PHP eventually, the CGI news script is left over from the old design).

I have a Linux based webserver on my LAN which I use to develop PHP/MySQL based webpages and work with the forum designs before I upload to the main Rage3D server.

The easiest way to learn is to just sit down and play with it all. That goes for graphics (vector and bmp), plain HTML and serverside scripting like PHP, Perl/CGI and ASP as well as clientside scripting like Javascript and webserver setup (which is definitly part of being a webdev).

Play with photoshop as much as you can, click all the buttons and menus and explore the whole thing. There are tons of tutorials out there which will help familiarize yourself with it like www.wastedyouth.org (my fav), and www.pixelcore.com is a good start-point. Also check out www.deviantart.com.

Don't use a WYSIWYG HTML editor, if you want to learn use a text-based editor like Homesite which shows you the code and gives you total control.

Oh, and most importantly, don't just test with Internet Explorer! Contrary to what most "pro" webdevs thing, IE is not the only browser people use. Get Mozilla (www.mozilla.org) and Opera (www.opera.com) and if you have access to it, test on Linux as well.
 
I agree with Ratchet. HomeSite 5 is the best editor (at least one of the best). The best thing you can do is to learn to write HTML by hand. It gives you much more control, and makes it easier mixing for example PHP and HTML later (most people want to be able to make dynamic content after playing around with html for a while) :)

Oh, and I'll give you links to some good web dev sites too:
www.devarticles.com (I've written some articles for this site)
www.sitepoint.com (In the progress of writing one for this site)
www.devshed.com
www.edevcafe.com

Hope it works out for you! :)
 
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