I’d like to try to discuss the basic software tools we could use to design website. Although the software I used might be difference with yours, but at least it got the same function. Lets start it one by one as below:

Graphic Design Software
If you’re asking senior web designer, they will suggest you to use popular graphic application for web designing. The reason is simple, the more popular the application, you’ll found bunch of tutorial along with designers community sharing about difficulties, errors, bugs, some skills and tips, etc. With it, problem solving became faster and easier with popular graphic application.
When you have no worried on handling your graphic design software, then gather your power focusing on creativity for the design. Some popular application are corel draw, adobe photoshop, etc.

Text Editor
Software in this category have function to process the HTML, CSS, PHP, or JavaScript that consists only of text. So really do not need complicated software that heavy loading and too much complicated. By default Notepad and wordpad actually could do the work, but use the application that is not made ??for web design editor of course there are drawbacks.

One of the popular web design editor is Adobe Dreamweaver (formerly known as Macromedia Dreamweaver). Web editors are also using the system WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get). So web design that you see on the Adobe Dreamweaver’s what you’ll see in a browser. In addition to the features distinguishing color (syntax coloring) there are also various other facilities that help a web designer.

Web Servers
Web Application Server is needed if your website using programming languages ??other than HTML, as examples: PHP or ASP. The task of this application is to simulate our computer into a server local web site. So to test the look of the website / blog that we make do not need to use a real internet connection. The way is by accessing the default address your website / blog that is http://localhost/.

For blogs like WordPress CMS using PHP & MySQL language, there are so many web application servers. But the popular ones is XAMPP. Stability, appearance, and compatibility XAMPP is no doubt anymore. The obvious advantage to using a local web server is the cost of Internet connections that are not needed can be suppressed. And its easier to install it, rather then installing one by one.

The Web is inherently stateless because the connection between Web browser and Web server is severed after each page is delivered. When the visitor clicks a link to move on to another page or to perform an action such as placing a product in a shopping cart, the Web server has no nascent knowledge of whom that user is. Cookies allow the server to keep track of who’s who, even if only labeled with a number, and to manage the broader user interaction across the site.

Cookie Security
Much concern has been expressed over the years about cookies, mostly because sites are writing data directly to the user’s hard disk, leading to the question of what other portions of the system a Web server may access. There have also been concerns about whether Web servers can review and retrieve information left in the cookies.txt file by other Web servers.

First we should know how data is written to the cookies file. Servers don’t actually have access to your system. They only pass the information to the browser, which then writes it to the cookie file. Although more than one file may be associated with cookies, they are all text files. Text files are harmless to computers; they cannot contain viruses. The only information servers can pass to the browser for recording is either supplied by the server (such as the expiration date of the cookie) or by the user (such as the zip code in the previous example). In most cases, if the user supplies any information, it is the value of the variables. The cookie cannot contain any personal information unless the user directly
supplies it.

Second, Its important to examine the sending of data from the hard disk back to a Web server. The browser will only send data stored in the cookies file back to the server. It does not scour your system looking for configuration information or other personal data. Additionally, when the browser receives a request from the server for cookie information, it must compare the domain that request originated from with the domain already written in the cookie file. If they do not match, the data will not be sent.

Writing Cookies
Writing cookies require deep knowledge of programming, but lets try to take a look at it. Various programming languages can be used, from relatively simple scripting languages like JavaScript to the more complex Perl scripts and CGI scripts written in C or by middleware products that interact between the server and the Web browser.

The most common way scripts and programs add a cookie is to insert a Set-Cookie header, which means that the server sends additional information to the client when the client makes a get request. A generic Set-Cookie header would look like this:
Set-Cookie: NAME=VALUE; expires=DATE; path-PATH;
domain=DOMAIN_NAME; secure

The programming part comes in when this information is sent to the client, because it is not sent manually. Usually, a program is written (like a CGI script) that automatically gathers the information and sends it. For example:

Set-Cookie: NAME=user; expires=Friday, 30-Jan-01 12:00:00 GMT;
path-/; domain=webgeek.com; secure

A separate program is used to handle the cookie when the user returns to the site. When a user with the same browser (using the same profile) comes to the WebGeek site, the browser checks the URL that the user has chosen and tries to match it to the different URLs in the cookies file. If the user has come to the site before and a cookie was set, then the browser will locate that cookie and send it to the server so that the server will have the cookie information readily available. How the server uses the cookie information depends on the contents of the cookie. One of the most common ways is an auto-logon feature that allows the Web site to remember the visitor.

Three major terms are used to describe the styling and presentation of text on both paper and the Web: typeface, font family, and font. A typeface is a specific design for a set of characters. The design is what gives the characters their
unique look. Is there a curlycue at the bottom of the letter g or a long, waving top stroke on the capital letter F? Does the whole set look like the handwriting work of a five-year-old? All sorts of features like these go into designing the typeface, which is given a name by its designer. Common typefaces are Arial, Helvetica, Times New Roman, Garamond, and Courier.

A font, then, is a specific instance of a typeface. The additional properties of a font include the size measured in points, pitch (width of the standard character within the font, measured in characters per inch), and spacing. Therefore, if I were to correctly refer to a font, I’d need to say something like, “Courier 12 point, with pitch value of 10.”

The point value used to measure font size is a height measurement, with each point is approximately 1/72 of an inch. The Courier 12 point font, then, would be 12/72 of an inch high, or easier read as 1/6 of an inch in height. Many browsers generally use a 10-to 12-point font size as the default font size. Later in this chapter, I’ll look at how the user and the designer can make changes to those sizes. Finally, the font family is a set of fonts of the same typeface that have different sizes and other adjustable characteristics.

Typefaces and their associated fonts can be divided into two broad categories: fixed-width (also called monospaced) and proportional fonts. A fixed-width font gives the same amount of space to each letter, whereas a proportional font gives different amounts of space to different letters.

Many people consider typefaces to be the basis of graphic design. Well-chosen and well-placed typefaces are a key factor in whether documents communicate effectively to the intended audience. Typography is the study of the selection, combination, and placement of fonts.

In almost all aspects of computing experience, the user is able to choose which typeface to use in various interfaces, including the ones to be used for text displayed in your Web browser. Going further, not only can the user choose a typeface, but which specific font to use as well! However, the ability to make such changes and manage them to provide a pleasing result can be harder than it sounds.

Colors affect the way you see other colors. This phenomenon is used over and over in advertising, design, and decoration. You choose colors to enhance and emphasize other colors much as you would select a mat or a frame for a painting or a print.

Have you ever heard people describe themselves as a “winter” or an “autumn”? They are talking about their personal coloration—their skin tones, hair color, and eye color. When you purchase clothing, you automatically sense this—often unconsciously. Have you ever tried on a sweater that looked great on the shelf but appeared to make you look pale or ill? Do some colors of clothes make you look good? The reason is a color relationship between your personal coloration and color of clothes.

The Psychological Impact of Color
Color has a strong impact on people emotionally. Consider the following phrases:
1. They’re seeing red right now.
2. I’m having a blue day.
3. She has a yellow streak.
4. He’s still rather green.
5. She told him a little white lie.

Each of these statements is immediately understandable without a description of the situation or the emotions involved. Color has the same effect on the viewer it sets a mood or a feeling.
Warm color might have it own different user segment as well.

Shockwave animations are created using the Macromedia Director Studio authoring tool. Currently in version 8 of its release, Director Studio not only creates Shockwave animations and applications for the Web but also nearly any multimedia experience on a computer platform, including interactive CDs.

Although much of the Director Studio interface makes use of drag-and-drop and a myriad of palettes that you would find in other Macromedia applications, a large segment of the work is done in a scripting language known as Lingo.

Macromedia Flash
Macromedia Flash, currently in version 5, has a very similar look and feel when compared to Director Studio. In some ways, Flash can be described as “Director Lite” in that it concentrates on animations and reactions to user input (objects move or change based on mouse clicks), rather than the more complex interactive components possible using Director and Lingo scripting for Shockwave.

Flash animations have been particularly popular recently for creating a splash page—a cool, wowinducing introduction to a site. Though perhaps visually stunning (depending on the talent of the artist!), they can have the effect opposite of grabbing the visitor’s attention and making them stay. If a splash page contains animation, which by its nature results in a longer download, and provides no other information, many users will move on to sites that give them what they’re looking for on the very first page.

Other alternative putting multimedia tool inside your site is with JavaScript.
JavaScript is a programming language included in the Netscape Navigator (and several other) browser executable program. It’s an interpreted language, meaning the browser processes the program instructions, or scripts, at the moment they are run a process known as a run-time event. JavaScript is also a basic object-based programming language. An object-based system of programming development views each portion of the Web page and browser as an object the browser window itself is an object, as is an image within the XHTML file being displayed. Object based simply means that the programming instructions identify individual objects and then direct instructions to them specifically.