I am learning illustrator and i want to know what the best web design program to use when making most of my stuff in illustrator. go live,, dreamweaver.? thanks

adam

Well either photoshop or illustrator work well with just about anything. I personally prefer Dreamweaver over golive but even so in Dreamweaver I rarely use it as more than a beefed up notepad.

Go-live is to Dreamweaver what Corel Draw is to Illustrator. :)

I don't regularly use Dreamweaver, but I do instruct it, and I would say it can't be beat when it comes to a full featured html editor. But if you have a good knowledge of HTML and prefer hand coding, Dreamweaver is a waste of money.

^ what he said

I prefer Dreamweaver. I use mainly photoshop and then cut them up for HTML.

You can use Macromedia FireWorks. It uses BOTH design/vector and export to html.

Just bumped in to post some Syntax-Highlighting Softwares you could use for coding (you might wanna try them)...

BTW, these are FREEWARES!

1. Jan Fiala's PSPad (http://www.pspad.com/en/index.html)
2. EVRSoft's 1st Page 2000 (http://www.evrsoft.com/1stpage2.shtml)
3. P. Lutus' Arachnophilia (http://www.arachnoid.com/arachnophilia/index.html)



.alienx

I use Dreamweaver 80% of the time and Homesite 20% of the time. I personally look at the two issues separately (graphics/layout design and coding). So in my opinion create your graphics and layouts in Illustrator (I prefer Photoshop or Fireworks), and then decide on the Web development tool that you will use to put it all together as a separate issue. There are a few out there, but only a couple at the top of the pro Web design heap: Dreamweaver, GoLive, Homesite. I think you already have a few good suggestions in this thread. Happy slicing! :)

thanks everyone. luckily I have dremweaver and have very basic knowledge of it. so basicaly what should i do in illustrator just the buttons , layout, pictures,,, what about drop menus and text?

adam

In Illustrator, if that's your graphics tool of choice, you do the design of your Website. In other words you essentially just draw a pretty picture of what you want the site to look like. You also should keep in mind that what you draw, you have to also build with CSS and HTML, so try to keep it in a grid. Think right angles and boxes. Once you have a design drawn, you will probably do some "slicing". That is where you use the Slice tool to break your drawing up into rectangles and squares. These will become your <div> tag blocks or your <table> cells. After you create the the slices, you'll be doing a "Save for Web". We could start a whole thread on "Save for Web", so I'll just leave the research on that topic up to you. I hope this is at least enough to get you started. And remember, you've got some pretty sharp Web design minds in this forum, so I'm sure others will add to this. Below is a screen capture of some slices I did in Photoshop (the Slice tool in Illustrator is essentially the same as Photoshop's). This is the header of an old, ugly, and unused site design of mine, but it should help convey the concept. Keep in mind this only scratches the surface. There are some fine points I could go into, but I won't here. This is intended to get you headed in the right direction. Best of luck! :)

Note the 5 slices:
http://www.jeffsdigital.com/images/slice_sample.gif

thanks J-Money that helped out some.

ag