As market conditions get tighter, management expect staff to become more multi-skilled. Often marketing and administration staff are tasked with the job of building or at least maintaining the company's website, a daunting task for someone with little or no Web development experience. So let's have a look at what is involved with building and maintaining a website.



Most websites are built using code called HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language), this code is then interpretated by a browser such as Internet Explorer, Firefox or Safari, and displayed as a Web page.

The first way to build a website is to learn how to hand code HTML web pages. HTML is actually a fairly easy computer language to learn, however there are thousands of different HTML tags, and it would take a beginner quite some time to learn and master these before been able to build an entire website. Apart from the steep learning curve another potential problem with this method is that it is very time consuming to hand code an entire website. In recent years CSS or Cascading Style sheets has become the accepted way to format and layout Web pages, so apart for learning the HTML language Web designers also need to learn CSS, as each Web page is a combination of HTML and CSS.

The next method to build a website is to use an HTML editor. HTML editors are software programs which code the HTML for you. The user gets to use an easy menu system whilst the software does the dirty work and codes the HTML. There are many different HTML editors such as Microsoft's FrontPage and Web Expressions, however the World's leading program and the program most Web professionals use is Adobe Dreamweaver. Dreamweaver is a very user-friendly program that users can learn, by attending a three day class, at an Adobe Authorized Training Center.

Dreamweaver also allows users to add CSS to format and layout their Web pages as well as other interactive elements such as Javascript drop down menus and more. So by learning an HTML editor, in as little as 3 days, you can get up to speed with building or maintaining a professional looking website. Dreamweaver costs around $399 so it is relatively inexpensive, especially when you consider the amount of development time it can save, or how much it would cost to outsource your Web development.

On a side note Dreamweaver, also allows users to manually edit HTML code. This feature is called round-trip html editing and experienced Web developers love the ability to edit the HTML code manually, whilst still taking advantage of Dreamweaver's rapid development environment.