Ok, so I thought that if paid 400+ bucks for a program to help build a website that it would be at least kinda user friendly. My brain hurts. Can someone tell me the average pixel size of a hompage? I guess my skill set was much to shallow to start using this program. $400 bucks probably would have been better allocated to paying someone else to make me a site for me. Is it really that difficult to do a simple webpage? http://www.argent.com thats all I want, easy simple and clean. Really. Oi....

I banged my head against the wall too - and I used Front Page. It was not until I hooked up with an awesome web design community that I really got a good education. (The "For Dummies" book helped, but only slightly...)

This website, http://www.outfront.net has some excellent design help in the Forums, and I see that they have added a dreamweaver tab...I presume that they are offering some tuts for dreamweaver. Originally designed as a help resource for Front Page users, it has evolved to include help for other html editors as well.

I became a successful website designer because of that forum. The forum is AWESOME and there are several folks on there - Jaybee is one of my favorites - who really know their stuff.

Making a web page is like second nature to me now, but I did struggle at the beginning - until I found Outfront. LOL

Thanks, I really appreciate it!

Not sure if anyone could offer any advise, but I downloaded a template from http://www.bravenet.com and I downloaded the CSS file with graphics and I can't change their little logo because it is attached to the background. Is this normal?

If you put the page up online that you're having trouble with and give a link, maybe I can help? (maybe...lol)

I do mine in Dreamweaver and I have mine set to 800 width. You can also set yours to fluid. Are you using design mode or code mode? If you need help with HTML a good basic book is "Teach Yourself HTML Visually".

As with most professional apps there is usually a steep learning curve. Once you become comfortable with them however, the payoffs are rich.

Dreamweaver, Fireworks, Photoshop, Final Cut Pro... I was intimidated when I began with these, but with a little persistence (and a few books) I can now bend them to my will!

I am ok with Photoshop, and I used the http://www.easywebtuts.com tutorial, but my site cam out different, my HTML didn't even look the same. I do understand what a CSS menu is though. I am using the design mode to build it and I might as well be learning chinese. I appreciate the help you guys, but remeber the title, "Dreamweaver/RETARD problem"

Prodigy, I would have put sailors to shame when I was learning HTML and trying to do different things with CSS and javascript. It usually turned out that I did some stupid little thing wrong.

This is the look that I am going for, http://i39.photobucket.com/albums/e200/aclarke00/webdesigncopy.jpg no stealing my idea! Just kidding, but would this be difficult to do? Or should I say any more difficult than a regular site?

Well it looks slick but I don't think it will do well for SEO.

Indeed it does look slick. As Perky stated though, you might want to add some additional text to the index page to make it a bit more SEO friendly.

I actualy will probably work on it some more to insert some text, house pics, happy families, etc...

Does graphics make a difference on a websites load time? Just curious how that works.

Yes. If you're going to maintain your own site you should become proficient in optimizing your web images. Pet peeve of us webmasters is being able to bake a cake while waiting for unoptimized real estate images to load.

Do yourself a favor and invest in some image editing software. Fireworks is the preeminent web graphics package, Photoshop does a good job too. If you don't want to spend money Irfanview is a great free alternative.