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Originally Posted by fivesixteen86
what is the best programming software I could use to begin with?
I've been fooling around on paper and it looks pretty good. But my lack of drawing and graphic skills are getting to me so I want to try it on the computer!
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That can vary a lot from person to person, I usually mock the entire page up in photoshop then make the images from that, then make the html/css/javascripts to do what I want in Netbeans or MS Web Developer 2008 Express. Another way is to use a program like Adobe Dreamweaver, Microsoft Expression Web, or some other WYSIWYG HTML editor. Whichever way you go I recommend Firefox with the Firebug extension to evaluate the final page to debug problems, then testing in IE and Safari.
Some what will work for you will depend on how your data is stored and accessed. If you are using Java, Netbeans is a good IDE for that. If you are using ASP, Web Developer is good for that. Their are probably some for PHP, Pearl and other languages. Any of them would do for basic pages like html, xml, javascript, or css pages. These are good for mixing the html code with the program language to get it to interact with the database with your information is on but require more knowledge of html and the language you are using. You might look into a CMS system, their are several out and they have a lot of functionality already programed so you do not have to write everything from scratch (the drawback is it makes you more dependent on how their system was designed to function).
The WYSIWYG editors are generally good for doing editing something that looks like the page that will be rendered, but can make it harder to edit code by hand, and I do not know how easy it is to access a database through them if it is possible (Even if it is not you could use the html code it makes and add to it in another program if you liked it's features).
If you are considering microsoft technology the have started allowing students too uses the several of their 'pro' tools for free, probably to compete with open source programs. Warning if you go with a dependency on ASP, IIS and SQL server there are less hosts to choose from and you may pay a more to have it hosted. Here is the link to the site
https://downloads.channel8.msdn.com/
I am sorry to ramble on a bit, I hope it was fairly coherent.