newbie to web design

<p>i have subscribed to lynda.com for the month. because i have no job and plenty of time on my hands right now, i figured i would expand my horizons and learn as much as possible about other aspects of photography.<br>

i had a buddy build me a website a few years ago. <a href="joshschutz.com">joshschutz.com</a> i have access to the blog and i find that wordpress is fairly intuitive. the rest of the site isnt what i want on many levels. i use godaddy for my domain. i believe i can use them for my host as well. anyways, i am planning on using dreamweaver to build my site. would you suggest another program, or maybe a different path all together to go down. like i said i am a newb to web design. to be honest with you i'm not sure if i could fully tell you the difference between flash and html. where should i start? <br>

thanks for the help everyone.</p>

<p>I use Dreamweaver and numerous others, but I like NetObjects Fusion for its superb handling of the organization of the site. It is very intuitive, and has a lot of built-in objects, like contact forms, and even a couple of photo galleries. Price is about $149. See www.netobjects.com. If you want to play with a freebie program, NVU (.com, I think) is a really nice product. I don't believe it manages all the pages, but I could be wrong. It is an excellent HTML editor.</p>

<p>Josh, I've used Dreamweaver for about a year and like it very much. I had no clue where to start in creating a site and was fortunate enough to come across an excellent book, <em>Web Publishing with HTML and CSS</em> by Laura Lemay and Rafe Colburn. I highly recommend it. You'll want to learn at least some basic HTML and CSS.</p>

<p>As for hosts, shop around. Many offer an assortment of free add-on programs to your site along with unlimited bandwidth and storage. Avoid hosts that drop advertising into your site. Regardless of the OS of your computer, I'd choose a host using either Linux or Unix servers.</p>

<p>I agree that your Wordpress site needs some serious attention. For example the images on the front page running into the sidebar look very unprofessional, also that they are presented one under the other not in some type of gallery format. I don't particularly like the galleries your friend created. I am using NextGen for my sites (eg www.fmueller.com), and you might or might not prefer that.</p>

<p>Be that as it may, that you don't like your current Wordpress site as it is is no reason to throw out the proverbial baby with the bathwater, and abandon Wordpress alltogether. Wordpress is highly customizable, and a lot of things that I would find hard to do in a flash site can be easily achieved in Wordpress by downloading a free plugin. Wordpress is a great content management system for a site, it is free, it enjoys excellent support via it's own forums, and has a very comprehensive documentation of all features in the codex. I've done college classes in web design (html and css) and all that can be used to customize Wordpress. IMHO unless your main goal is not to create a great site, but to learn Flash/Dreamweaver, I would persist with Wordpress. You seem to have the basics down already, and it shoudl be faster for you to achieve the desired result. With that being said, there are many ways to create a great site.</p>

<p>Best of luck!</p>