OK, thought I would add a couple of thoughts to the pot that may help you.
1. Decide what your objectives are. Do you want to learn Web Design/Programming, or just want to get a site up and running?
2. If you decide you want to just get a site up and running then find a WYSIWYG Editor/Dev Environment like Dreamweaver, Visual Studio, etc etc.
**If you are thinking of frontpage, consider the fact that many people, (in fact everyone I know) considers websites developed with Frontpage as 'amateurish' (and yes you can tell), and that's just the look and feel. The code it generates is messy, unnecessarily complicated and doesn't comply with many of the standards set down by the W3C, especially not XHTML.
3. If you want to learn how to develop web sites properly, or professionally, then start by finding and reading sites that provide tutorials and reference guides, such as:
(great site to get started with 'concepts', like DB programming/ CSS / XML etc)
and
(great site for looking up what elements are avaialable, and what they do)
As you advance also try sites like:
This will give you a flavour of what technologies are available to help you deliver the functions you wish and what can be done with these technologies. From this you should get an idea of what type of server technology you wish to use, such as ASP, PHP, JSP, CGI, etc. If you're beginning, I would highly recommend you keep away from CGI and JSP (unless you have extensive Java or Perl knowledge).
ASP and PHP are 2 sides of the same coin - both are quite widespread with 'learning developers' and both have a lot of support on the net (VERY Important). But be careful to check whether you web host can support the one you choose.
3. Once you have decided which technology you want to use, then look at the tools that will help you use it.
As many other people will tell you - learning a programming language is about getting your hands dirty, spending a lot of time and effort banging your head against a wall, and researching on the net - google and tech forums will become your best friend..! (But it really is worth it)
Notepad is too basic for a programmer - (although I have used it in the past) - but it is not far off the mark - UltraEdit,TextPad and the like are all really 'advanced notepads', and will help with indenting, color coding, etc etc.
I personally have never been a fan of WYSIWYG editors - to get a really good polished finish to a solution, you need to have full control over the code - WYSIWYGs try to do too much, or too little, or don't support XYZ feature - so you end up doing most of it yourself, and if you get into 'clicking mode' when you begin, rather than typing, you may find it tempting not to bother looking at the generated code, and 'make do' with the Apps coding techniques.. which are very constrictive.
My suggestion would be to download a free editor such as Visual Web Developer Express for ASP/ASP.NET:
And code by hand (although it has a WYSIWYG, don't use it) using the sites mentioned earlier to guide you through the process. The editor will give you type-ahead/autocomplete functionality, color coding so you can see what you're doing and a lot of other helpful functionality - as well as access to your selected Database. If you get really stuck, then you can click on an element in the toolbox, and it will add it to your page - here you can see the code that works, so you can modify and code manually in the future.
And of course, tek-tips has many forums dealing with specific web technologies... so if you don't know.. ask !
Hope that helps.
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