Professional looking sites/frames?

Hi all,
I hope I'm in the right area for this. I am curious as to how people create nice professional looking sites with nice looking frames/borders. I often see really good sites with a picture and logo at the top and really good navigation at the side and it all fits in with the site. Can someone tell me what is used to make these as I have used various programs without any success.
What I am looking for is a good banner/frame at the top using text customized to my liking and a small picture that I have ready and then a menu/navigation on the left side with 7 menus & approx 5 sub menus below them. I can use normal text for that and make links to them but they never look as good as others I have seen.
Thanks for the help.
Steven

I usually don't use any frames or anything, but a solid color border is nice once in a while.

CSS:

Code: Select all

img {
    border: 10px solid #333;
}

Using a simple text editor and html and css you can do amazing things. For a really swanky logo/banner use photoshop, fireworks or you favourite image editing tool. Photoshop's best though (that's what me thinks anyway).

CSS will help you style the page the way you want it. CSS can be a very powerful tool in the right hands.

Check these for more info:

http://www.w3schools.com/html/default.asp
http://www.w3schools.com/xhtml/default.asp
http://www.w3schools.com/css/default.asp


Those are your tools but for the site to work well you'll need a good design, check out your favourite sites for inspiration. There are a lot of tutorials online that deal with navigation and the like so google it and you'll come up with a ton (not an actual ton).

Have fun.

I hope that's what you meant.

Pete.

P.S. Handy to check the source code of a site if you like an element of it. Just right-click and view source.

CSS is your friend

Look at my sig or the sticky in the CSS forum called Resources for learning how to use CSS for layout

Yeah the same acievment can be better executed with css. Learn it, Love it, Live it.

For software, Use the Macromedia Package (if you don't already) :P. Cant go wrong with Macromedia.

hahaha...can't go wrong with notepad, or PsPad either...lol

haha, aw but Macromedia looks cooler.

nah, not cooler than PsPad...lol Plus notepad and PsPad output better code...and work on more platforms!!

There are a number of very different ways to accomplish structuring of a webpage, but if you really want to do the best job, you have to bite the bullet and learn how to do it with CSS and html. No frames (except maybe iframes, at least until you know exactly what you're doing), no tables except for tabulated data, no "programs" like Dreamweaver.

A good editor is a big help. I bought EditPad Pro and I really like it. But any professional-level editor is, basically, Notepad. It does not transform your input.

For graphics, let me suggest Paintshop Pro as an alternative to Photoshop. It is somewhat easier to use , although it is still plenty difficult to learn. Most important, it is much, much cheaper, and it's very powerful. I'd say it's just as good as Photoshop at 1/5 the price, unless you are a power user. You can use it to make your banners, resize graphics, etc.

skEdit, skEdit, skEdit hehe. But you guys actaully made me fire up windows for something other than browser testing. Trying PsPad now.

__________________

Just going to toss in The Gimp while a bit of a weird UI experince is prett6y damn good once you get the gist of it. And its free.

__________________

So what did you think of Pspad moojoo?

I used pspad the other day and liked but unfortunately it's windows (grrrr!), luckily I've got parralells (not that I can spell it). Now all I need is the new version and I won't even know that I'm running windows. My only problem is that BBedit wasn't cheap and I can't just not use it. That'd seem like a waste of money. Dilemma.

Pete.

I switched from BBEdit to skEdit. skEdit is so nice.

BBEdit kicks PsPads ass hands down. I have BBEdit and skEdit, but in all honesty if BBEdit is your game Textwrangler is close and free. Made by the same people, more like BBEdit light.

As for PsPad, I liked it although from first use I can;t see any advantage over HTML-Kit. Either way both apps have that horrid windows UI heh. *ducks and hides*

__________________

I did a Photoshop course & couldn't get on with The Gimp at all, but my tutor recommended Serif PhotoPlus which is much more like Photoshop to use & is also free to download from the internet.

Despite Photoshop's rather steep price, it's worth buying. It's such a powerful program that you really can't do without it.

I agree Ryan, just can't afford it at the mo. & PhotoPlus works for me for now...perhaps when I've made my millions web designing I'll be able to invest in Photoshop!

Cheers
Lynn