What is the best starter web design program for a novice

I have a basic Site for our band HAZAH ( URL) but I would love to rebuild it - I've had a bit of a go by picking up some very basic html (by cutting/pasting/looking at sites like these) but want to make our site look cool. Any advice much appreciated - this is my first post Georgieboy

Hazah/GeorgieBoy, welcome to the forums!

If you're looking to start a new site from scratch, which in your case isn't a bad idea (given that you're new to it and all), it's best to sit down and map out all the information you want to have on your site. Given that you're a band, I figured some member info, band biography, album discography, tour dates, contact info (booking info?), and other information.

You may want to look at yourself as well... figure out what YOU want to learn... do you want to learn multimedia stuff like Flash and Quicktime, are you intersted in developing your own shopping card using a server-side language, would you prefer to just keep things pretty static...

After all that, figure out your artistic direction. Perhaps your fluent-ness with programming and your overall vision of the site. Some band sites use flash, others stream music using RealMedia, WindowsMedia, Quicktime, or something else.

Best of all, ask questions... You've come to the right place if you get stuck... avoid asking us to do your whole project for you, as that's not why we're here... but we will definately try our best to help you out of a jam.

2 Men, 8 instruments and a laptop called Apple eena
Sounds awesome... i'll listen to the MP3 when I get the chance =)

Hi MadCowDzz

Thanks very much for your advice and prompt answer - yes i would agree with the content of our site being pretty much as you described -

...some member info, band biography, album discography, tour dates, contact info, booking info, and other information.

plus a function where viewers can download "demo MP3's" - The plan is that we will have our music for download from the major internet music download sites like iTunes/napster etc. so a link to those sites will be included.

I once had a short go with "Director" at college and got on fairly well with it - do people use this for internet sites or is it more for CD ROMS? I'm pretty fluent in many music software packages and have been composing with MIDI and recording audio with a computer for many years so I reckon I'm pretty quick at learning new software. Flash/multimedia could well be the answer... but I don't want to exclude phoneline (slow connection) visitors, which we still have quite a few of here in UK - so maybe I need an option for both when visitors first arrive at the site.

Any suggestions on a good program to start on appreciated (I'm on a Mac running OS X by the way)

Cheers
Georgieboy (HAZAH)

One thing you may want to define for yourself is the ultimate goal of the site.

Truth is, a lot of band websites aren't standards-based... they aren't necessarily targeted towards those with disabilities or special accessible web-browsing devices... as much as I may cringe to say it, it might be okay for your site to follow the standard-less route... It sounds like you don't expect to make a career out of web-design...

However if you choose to learn a little bit of standard web design and a sort-of "best practice" of modern web design, there are some key benefits... [1] Your site will likely look/act the same to all visitors (regardless of browser or any external device)... [2] You will reduce your bandwidth saving you money for serving the page as well as catering nicely to those users on dialup... [3] You will find the maintainability of the content much easier.

To answer your question, I believe Director is used primarily for CD-Roms and desktop applications... Flash is similar and is pretty much designed for internet use.

Many "standardistas" will curse a site which uses Flash. To that, I would generally advise to not design your entire site in Flash. Again though, most band sites do just that, and frankly I think it's fine. For a band you're selling more of a multimedia experience than broadcasting news to people overseas.

A lot of this relies on your background and your own vision of the future.

As I'm sure you already know, Apple is well-suited towards multimedia and graphic design. For software, if you don't want to do the HTML yourself, personally I've used Macromedia's Dreamweaver in the past. It also interacts well with Flash and Fireworks... Given that they were bought by Adobe, I would expect greater integration with Photoshop in the future as well...