Best Web development?

[Confide]

What is the best web development tool for creating eye catching high end websites with POWER

 

[Nothinman]

Your mind.

 

[aswedc]

Dreamweaver

 

[prosaic]

Originally posted by: Nothinman
Your mind.

Not MY mind! Can anyone spare me a cup of creativity?

I use NotePad Pro (a very nice text editor with some terrifically helpful html editing features), but then no one would call anything I've created a high end, powerful Web site. I don't even use Javascript. I just do plain old Transitional 4.0 (which does at least validate). I don't even use CSS. I have my own way of propagating style changes across entire sites. I say I do it this way because I'm a purist. But it's really because I'm lazy.

- prosaic

 

[Nothinman]

Not MY mind! Can anyone spare me a cup of creativity?

I have the same problem...

But you can't get around it, you either choose to leave the site boring (that was my last decision, for an internal only site though) but functional or get someone to give you ideas. Because if you use default templates someone will notice eventually and I'd rather the site be boring that blatantly copied or default.

I just do plain old Transitional 4.0 (which does at least validate). I don't even use CSS. I have my own way of propagating style changes across entire sites. I say I do it this way because I'm a purist. But it's really because I'm lazy.

Sounds a lot like my methods, luckily I don't have to do it often.

 

[GagHalfrunt]

Originally posted by: Nothinman
Your mind.

That's the right answer. There's no program that you can just load up, hit the "give me a cool site" menu and have it done for you. The best way is to steal ideas, but not designs. Look around the web and see what you like, then check the source code to see how they did it. Adapt a menu from one site, a basic layout from another, a color-scheme from a 3rd, etc etc, and meld those components into a unique design. And remember that quality content beats eye-catching glitz any day of the week. What looks cool the first time you see it looks far less cool by the 5th time and is usually annoying as hell by the 10th. By the 20th time most things make you want to scream. Can you name a single site that you visit often just because it's eye-catching? Of course not, the sites that keep you coming back are the ones that work the best and offer what you need. Leave the "this is sooooooo kewl...." designs to the kiddies on GeoCities and the Flash designers who want to prove how clever they are rather than coming up with a site that works. Your content is what drives your site, the other stuff is only temporarily amusing.

 

[rh71]

Tools? IDEs you mean?

Flash environment with ColdFusion programming. Check out OneScreen. Combining a nice front end (using your creativity) through Flash with its inherent ability to communicate with just about any dynamic web application language (commonly ColdFusion) and you're set.

Look into Flash Remoting with ColdFusion MX on the Macromedia website.