Which tool is best for a beginner creating a complex website? InDesign?

A frequently-asked question:

I need to create a web site, but I have very little web design experience. It is for a government program, so it can NOT be done through hosting sites that provide user-friendly tools.

I need a way to quickly create a website, but which can offer the following aspects:

~users need to search 100-150 pdf documents (research summaries) available on the website (can not use google or yahoo search, must be non-commercial). It would be best if this could be done like an advanced search engine or even online catalogue with several categories (author/researcher, date, insitution, topic, etc)

~calendar with email reminders to those who sign up (but we can not use a commercial prodcut like yahoo or google calendars)

~slides shows of photos, possibly sorted by project / person / year (similar to pdfs)

I don’t have the time to get up to speed with the graphics aspect required to make a Dreamweaver website look professional. Would InDesign work?


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  1. David D
    January 28th, 2012 at 03:58
    Reply | Quote | #1

    No. InDesign is a DTP program designed for producing print work.

    And Dreamweaver isn’t going to produce good results without a decent knowledge of the underlying structure of what it produces (and how code interacts with different browsers, window sizes and font sizes). Nor is it going to create search engines and other features requiring server side interaction for you.

  2. Laogeodritt
    January 28th, 2012 at 05:26
    Reply | Quote | #2

    Using a WYSIWYG editor will generally give you poor results; it might look good in the browser engine that the editor program writes for and at your resolution, but there’s no guarantee that it’ll retain its intended appearance on different browsers and at different window sizes.

    Ideally, you should hand-code the website interface with proper, standard code and cross-browser compatibility in mind.

    Also, what you’re looking for (the search engine, calendar, etc.) requires the use of server-side script; e.g. PHP, Perl, ASP. If you’re supposed to code the actual search engine and calendar, you’re going to need much more than HTML+CSS.

  3. A B
    January 28th, 2012 at 07:07
    Reply | Quote | #3

    the fact that your making something for the government and asking this kinda question is kinda strange.

  4. youngboy1606
    January 28th, 2012 at 08:05
    Reply | Quote | #4

    Everything you describe I am doing on one of my sites. You will have to learn programming to do it.

    I’d recommend VS 2005 SP1 but if you think this is going to be a slap together project your dreamin’

    You could adapt DNN to do what you want but that’s going to be extensive also.