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use. The simplest to use tools often restrict your choices about your website, for example they may limit the number of pages, the style of the page, the amount and type of content on the page and so on. If you require greater freedom over your website, it is likely that tools become more complex in order to offer more flexible options. I will discuss the most common options below.

Some tools, usually web based site builders that offer an entire website in a few clicks, allow you to choose from a set of pre made designs, and then allow you to enter your own text and maybe images into the pages. These are very simple to use, but your site will most certainly not be unique. Also, they usually put your site online for you, but usually not with your own domain name, eg mysite.freehost.com or freehost.com/mysite. This is probably the easiest way to start a website, but you are limited to the designs and styles and structures that the tool offers, your site will look the same as other sites built using the same tool, and the code used is often poor quality.

Dreamweaver is a popular choice at the other end of the scale. It allows you to build almost anything you can dream of, you can build sites without knowing anything about the code, and you can also view and edit the code if you know what you're doing. The software is very expensive and very complex. To take full advantage of all it's features, you have to take the time to learn how to use it. Unfortunately, the code it produces is usually rather poor, so if you don't know much about that side of things, you will probably end up with bad code. Dreamweaver is the tool of choice of a lot of professional web designers because it is popular in the industry and offers the greatest freedom of any of the tools available. This is also because it can be used to write your own code, and it shows you how your site will look as you write your code. I personally find it too complex for this purpose, I prefer the simplicity of the text editor. With dreamweaver, your choices for hosting are the same as those discussed above for writing your own code.

There are thousands of other tools between these two extremes which all offer different levels of control over your website, different hosting options, require different levels of skill to use, and output varying qualities of code. They are available in all price ranges from free to thousands of dollars, and are designed for different purposes from creating simple pages to managing

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