The Internet is emerging as a popularly-used communication medium, due to its widespread and effective reach. Almost everyone has their own website, be it a corporate website or a personal webpage. If you have been shying away from the thought of designing your own webpage, you must know that there exist a variety of web development and designing software that can help you with the designing as well as development of webpages and websites. Different Kinds of Web Design Software Web design is the aesthetic aspect of creating websites and webpages, and deals with all designing elements. The web designing process can be defined as the process of conceptualizing, modeling, and execution of electronic media content delivery over the Internet in the form of a markup language that is suitable for interpretation by a web browser, and can be displayed as a graphical user interface. Web designing includes all facets like typography, graphics, and color management. There is a variety of software to facilitate the web development process; similarly, the varieties of software applications available for web designing are plentiful. Adobe Flash Adobe Flash is a proprietary graphics and animation application development program. It is used to generate and transfer dynamic content, sound, video, and interactive applications over the Internet. Flash is very popular with designers, since it gives them precise control over every aspect of the designing process. Adobe Fireworks Adobe Fireworks is a graphic editor that can be used with both bitmap and vector images. One of the prominent features of Adobe Fireworks is that it can be used to resize vector objects without loss in quality. It is used to integrate objects with other applications, like Adobe Dreamweaver and Adobe Flash. Corel Draw Graphics Suite Corel Draw enables users to manipulate vector images. The Coral Draw Graphics Suite offers a complete range of editing tools with which users can adjust everything from contrast to color balance. One prominent feature of this application is that it allows users to change the image format from RGB to CMYK. In addition to a wide range of special effects and borders, users can also access a large collection of fonts and clip art that the suite offers. Adobe Photoshop Adobe Photoshop is a popular graphics editors used by designers while working with bitmap images. Although conventionally used for print media, this software is now popularly used for editing graphics for the Internet as well. Different Kinds of Web Development Software Webpage development is actually a generalized term that encompasses a wide variety of activities that go into the development of a website. Web development, in general, consists of all the earlier stages that include e-business development, web content development, writing the markup, programming, and web-server configuration. Basically, webpage development refers to all activities that can be labeled as non-design activities in the development of a website. Webpage development software is specifically designed or created to help a person with the web development process. Such software can either serve to assist the web developer with one or multiple aspects of web development. Microsoft Visual Studio Microsoft Visual Studio is the ultimate development tool used by web developers. It helps users create websites, web applications, and web services that can be run on any platform, which is supported by Microsoft's .NET framework. It also includes Visual Basic, Visual C#, Visual C++, and ASP.NET. Adobe Dreamweaver Dreamweaver is a very popular application that can hide the HTML code details of pages from the user, which enables non-coders to create webpages or websites. Aptana Aptana IDE is an open source integrated development environment (IDE) which is used for creating JavaScript based applications on the web. The software also includes coding assistance for JavaScript, HTML, and CSS languages, warnings, and error notifications. It also provides the possibility to customize and extend the user interface. Microsoft Expression Web Microsoft Front Page was replaced by Microsoft Expression Web, which is a commonly used HTML editor. This software application also offers built-in support for automated web templates. The software caters to the specialized requirements of professional designers. It provides assistance for integrating other scripts like Java and XML into websites. Coffeecup Visual Site Designer Coffeecup Visual Site Designer is web-designing software that is useful for users who have no knowledge of HTML. It is a 'what you see is what you get' (WYSIWUG) type of application, which means exactly that―what you see is what you get. Users can easily drag and drop images and text on the webpage according to their requirement. A few years back, web designing and web development might not have been something that a commoner and non-technical person would have tried their hands at. However, with the advent of so many useful software to assist you in building your website, the World Wide Web is calling out and waiting for everyone to join the league.