I want to do my personal web site myself. I am ok with coding but nt a graphic designer, any software that I should use? Normally what are the steps involved in web designing

I use photoshop most of the time and have never known any software that can close to it in what it can do, photoshop is used for graphics. I prefer DreamWeaver as my web design software.

Usually this is how I would do it:

1. Design the site on paper with all the links and sections on it.

2. Define which sections are going to be dynamic (i.e. PHP, etc) if any.

3. Start designing in photoshop, design the entire layout of the site in photoshop, keeping in mind how easy it will be to transfer it to DW.

4. Once the design is done in photoshop, crop it (selectively), and save the images For Web, and choose .gif or .jpg depending on contents of image.

5. Place all cropped images in DW and finish design.

6. Do any coding necessary and integrate it into the design.

These are just quick general steps i would follow for a SMALL project. All projects are different and require a different procedure.

Hope this helps.

Thanks thats a very clear explanation but when I look at the pricing for photoshop and dreamweaver, I stop dead in my track : ( Expensive stuff

If you're ok at coding, then you don't need Dreamweaver :)

As for the design part, you can give www.gimp.org a try. The Gimp is a fairly robust, open source, free graphic design program, similar to Photoshop. It's a touch less powerful, and there's a bit of a learning curve, but it's free and nearly good enough to be considered professional software.

I tried using gimp one time but I got really bored. I will just stick with gold ol'e photoshop :)

Oh, Photoshop is definitely the way to go if you can afford it. But OP mentioned having to pass all of these up because of price. The Gimp is a steal at $0.00! :)

I don't know about getting bored, unless you just decided it wasn't worth taking the time to learn, which is understandable if you have more common design tools like Photoshop.