To start off with you will need some sort of code editor to meet your web design requirements. Having a good understanding of the underlying code used to create a website will give you a much greater flexibility when you produce your websites. CSS, HTML and JavaScript are the visual markup languages that you should gain some understanding of.

The industry standard for web designers and programmers a like is Adobe Dreamweaver, which is the professional solution for web designers. Dreamweaver is a fully featured program that can handle pretty much anything you throw at it with extra features such as assisted syntax writing making your life a little bit easier. The important features of a code editor include having numbered line, collapsible code areas and syntax highlighting or colouring. All of these features can be found in free programs such as Notepad++.

Naturally images are a huge part of what a web designer does and having the images properly optimised for the web is an important matter. The 2 main image editing programs that are used in the industry include Photoshop also from Adobe as well as Fireworks which is more geared towards producing web content. Properly optimised images are a big deal in the web design world as they make the users experience more enjoyable by having faster loading pages. You can use GIMP which is free and very popular amongst people who don’t want to shell out for programs such as Photoshop.

You will also need some sort of FTP program to upload your files to the internet where everyone can see them. Dreamweaver comes with a built in FTP client but there are other options available for free such as the popular FileZilla FTP client. Whilst it may be a little tricky to configure an FTP client if you have never done it before there are many video tutorials available on the web which can help you.

For nearly every piece of highly priced software there is an open source or free alternative you can use. AlternativeTo.net is a great place to start looking for these alternate software programs. Once you are proficient with your website design skills you may want to consider trying some SEO or internet marketing skills to get more visitors to see your amazing website design.