in agreement with Mystical: I actually find it's easier to maintain a PHP site because for example say you have a site with ten pages and you make a tiny change to the links or something. If you have ten static pages, you have to go in and make that change individually to each of the ten pages. If you are using PHP, you have your links as an included file, you only have to make the change once and it's dynamically changed throughout the whole site.

as for starting a business, I wish you the best of luck; I started mine a couple years ago and I think it will really take off next year.

I do use Dreamweaver but I also use Adobe CS

the thing about web design is it's not just the coding, you have to create and manipulate a lot of graphics. So I guess whether you get Adobe CS or Macromedia MX or whatever they are selling now, you'll want to make sure you get something that also includes programs that will create and make change to both vector art and bitmap based graphics.

cautionary: while it's true you can view your web pages as you build them using the preview feature of programs like Dreamweaver and GoLive, this can be quite problematic because sadly the different major browsers do not always display the same code in the same way. They interpret margins and padding differently; one may not recognize certain commands or methods; and so on and so forth. You really have to test test test before final deployment, and chances are you'll catch some bugs after that. Heck I just had some bugs pointed out to me that I wrote probably a couple years ago...... those were my own fault, not a browser problem, but anyway.

yeah, I need to know a lot more than HTML from the sounds of these replies. LOL. damn! thought it was going to be a smash and grab job..looks like it's going to be slightly more complicated than that...what kinds of things does javascript allow you to do on web pages? Whenever I hear javascript I get nervous for some reason, haha

>If all you knwo is some html youre going to find yourself lacking, as others have pointed out at the minimum you need to know HTML and CSS. Anymore you need to kknow some Javascript as well and familiarity with at least one of the JS frameworks (Prototype, jQuery, etc..). Beyond that knowing a Dynamic language would be good (Ruby, C#.Net, PHP, etc..).

Good advice.

One of my local web design friends has never liked DW because she felt DW added a lot of extraneous code to a page. I'm a hand coder myself, so that has caused me to shy away from it too. But as others have said the increasing complexity of sites makes it more attractive to use these days.

no no no. I'm no where near a position to be going into business for web design, yet. It was a hypothetical question. thank's for your input though. much appreciated.

sounds good.