Greetings Steel Dolphin Community,

I was wondering, what program or programs are the standard in web design. I'm a hobbiest with digital art and I'd like a sharp sight to go along with it. The designs I've seen here are fantastic and the advice great. I'd like to get in the game. What would you consider the essentials, and bare in mind this isn't for any sort of professinal use. Just me. Thanks!

If your site will revolve mostly around looks then use a program like Macromedia Dreamweaver...if you want your code to be moderately clean, use Chami's HTML-kit (google that) but if you think you might want to make this professional one day and entirely accessible, try handcoding.
PS: Adobe GoLive is apparently a good substitiute for Macromedia Dreamweaver.

all of the courses I instruct are Dreamweaver/Photoshop (and flash). However before I let the students use dreamweaver, they must be able to hand code basic pages and understand the importance of well structured HTML (search engine placement, cross browser compatability, usability, to name a few). If you are learning to hand code HTML on your own, dreamweaver is great because it has all kinds of shortcuts and "Code Hints" in it's editing window. If you do not know how to use HTML adn start out with WYSIWYG, dreamweaver will make monstrous pages of unneccesary HTML.

Personally, I use a program called EditPadPro (http://www.editpadpro.com/). Don't be confused by the crappy website, it's a powerful program (multiline/multifile search and replace that supports Regular Expressions is one of my favorite tools in it). A few years ago I decided to find a lightweight, powerful text editor that would allow me to fully customize the editing window and syntax highlighting, and this is it (I like black background with green text and the fixedsys bitmap font). For this same reason, I started using SmartFTP (http://www.smartftp.com/) and have found it to be one of the best ftp clients out there.

same goes for TextPad (http://www.textpad.com) ... the site isn't that great, but it's great for coding ... i even use for less complex projects when using PHP and other scripting languages.