EDIT: Haha didn't realise how old this thread was, guess I'm suffering from the new forum setup....... Sorry!!Akane, Dreamweaver is basically like the Adobe Photoshop of webpages. It's the leading software for webpage creation. In it it you have 3 options for creating webpages - 'Design View' (visual interface, drag and drop, click buttons etc.), 'Code View' (self-explanatory, basically just typing text), or both at the same time (most of the time I use this, so I can use Dreamweavers quick visual interface but also quickly tweak parts manually using the code view).

I like to be very design/look conscious when creating websites so a WYSWIG (What You See Is What You Get) application like this essential as far as I'm personally concerned, so that as I build the site, I can oversee how it's going to look for the user.

I'm training to be a website designer... so I use it all the time. But of course I know HTML too, they always start by teaching you HTML (Hyper-Text Markup Language, this is the code that makes up the majority of webpages you see) first on web design courses so that if you have a problem in Dreamweaver you can weed it out manually using the Code View.

HTML is relatively simple though (yeah it's similar to BBCode tags)... it's when you try and do server-side scripting and web applications that you start having serious headaches.

There are cheap or free alternatives to Dreamweaver though... most famous one is Frontpage which alot of people seem to like. I'm wary of it though after someone asked me to clean up their webpage cos it was playing up and I found that Frontpage had added in a slew of random characters (like "************" for 10 lines) it was like an alien invasion but maybe it's just how you use Frontpage.
I'm happy to answer any questions you have Akane... well to the best of my ability.
