On 11/10/2005 2:53 AM, "Al Poulin" <alpoulin at cox.net> wrote: > My wife wants to start working on a web site. So as a casual newbie > watching this thread with interest, I noticed this following comment by > Richard, the original poster: "What > ever I end up doing I don't want to come back a year > from now and have to redo the whole site." > > Are you locked into the package you begin with? Or is it easily > transparent to move from one design package to another? In other > words, if you start with Composer or any other package, and then decide > to use another web designer, are you getting into complexities? There are 2 ways to look at this. (1)If Richard learns along the way as most of us do he is likely to become dissatisfied with earlier efforts and make a few tweaks as time goes by. This has nothing to do with the program, and everything to do with his skill levels. An expert with a simple program can make a miracle, a novice with dreamweaver is likely to make a mess. And no you are not tied to a certain program. I use more than one program in the same project because no program is perfect, and there is no need to tie oneself to a particular program (2)Also few beginners realise that continual update and tweaking is good for a website. Create a site then don't change it is a recipe to be ignored by the search engines. The spiders that crawl the web for the engines love finding change. As far as they are concerned change is the mark of an active site and an active business. Sites that don't change could easily be for businesses that went bust. There are millions upon millions of them and the spiders look for evidence of dead sites. And then, tweaking is your way of refining a site and helping it rise through the search engine results. You don't need to get expensive software, you need to learn what is required. Get a book like "Sam's Teach Yourself To Create Web Pages" or an equivalent, get an affordable WYSIWYG editor, Learn a few things, then down the track you will have the self knowledge of whether or not you need to buy Dreamweaver and Flash. Chances are good, if you enjoy web design, that you will. Although, if you only make the one site, all that money was a waste. Tony, http://www.tonyjohansen.com A Life In Art