Should I start on my website now?

I'm rookie website designer, i actually just got out of school, and before i start making website?

• i'm rookie website designer, i actually just got out of school, and before i start making website for people i want to practice for a few months or a one year, to make sure i know what im doing, i don't know what to use to practice, i was going to buy dream weaver, but right now i can't, its too expensive, i might have to wait for 2 more months to buy it, so if you a website designer, and you been practicing website design, please tell me how you been doing it......please help

• Answer:

  If you want to do web design anywhere near a professional level, stay far, far away from Dreamweaver and other such programs. They generate horrible code, and if you've actually been studying web design you shouldn't need to cheat like that anyway (and it will never come down in price... so if you're waiting on that, you're going to be waiting an awfully long time). When I was first learning, I used free text editors. TextWrangler is good, if you have a Mac. phpPad is good for windows. Both do color coding, which makes editing a lot easier, in my opinion. But they're JUST text editors. They don't write the code for you. At work, I use Eclipse which is a lot more robust, but geared more towards development (PHP, ASP.net, and the like) than design. phpPad: http://www.sourcecodesworld.com/scripts/phpPad-com-PHP-Editing-Made-Easy-19686/ TextWrangler: http://www.barebones.com/products/TextWrangler/ Eclipse: http://www.eclipse.org/downloads/