the most universally compatible way to do fancy websites?

Nowadays, what's the best way to make a nice dynamic site with slides and fades, maybe sounds and animations. I know there's a lot of new tech out there, but I haven't been paying much attention. Iim guessing its not flash.

Also if someone knows of an awesome wysiwyg website creation tool, I'm interested. Free or not. Imll be using photoshop for site graphics, so if it has some extra support for or an adobelike layer system, that's a plus

Don't know if this will help but go to http://www.webs.com It's free , Well sort of.

[quote:10c7pu50]Ask and ye shall recieve

AJAX, CSS, and some creativity can yield a lot.

As for WYSIWYG... I wish I knew. I'm too old school, I just type stuff. I know, it's silly

I have a wysewig html program called illuminatus , You can create full websites with the app.

It's quite dated but does the job.Here's the site http://www.digitalworkshop.co.uk/

[quote:1e7x3ilu]Ask and ye shall recieve

I played around with this a while back.

http://silex-ria.org/

Its basically a flash oriented cms.

Huge potential for an artist, and its open source.

http://www.wix.com

Flash, effects, everything you need. It's presentation functions are so quick and intuitive, I wish there was a plugin of it for Construct.

Don't do Flash and stuff. CSS styling is quite powerful, especially CSS3 with HTML5. All newest browsers support more and more CSS3 and HTML5 features and as we all know everyone has to update their browsers in order to maintain security. Look for a website authoring tool that uses CSS (CSS3 if possible, such as Dreamweaver).

Anyway, try to avoid Flash. If you overuse it, you will be practically invisible to Googlebot and the like, resulting in your site suffering a huge ranking penalty.

Learn CSS/HTML/Javascript etc. By definition they are the most universally compatible ways to make a website.

I myself use Wordpress.

(Now don't you go 'bah! wordpress!? FEH!')

WP started out as a blogging tool but nowadays is on-par with many CMSs.

On the customization front: It supports themes. Your own, or others, or mods of others. It even has a theme editor where you can modify the css and php files of the current theme without having to DL, edit, and upload it all back.

An example:

http://otakaos.110mb.com/

(Be sure to hover your mouse over certain elements, as they have some pretty nice effects, achieved without the use of flash.)

Wordpress uses PHP and MySQL, though.

You can build a fancy website easily with just HTML and CSS by using some sort of grid system (such as 960gs).

You also want to use a proper color scheme... there is http://colorschemedesigner.com/ and stuff like this.

Flash plus good ol' HMTL... nothing beats it.

~Sol

I hate nothing more than flash on a website! I think we will see it becoming an obsolete technology within the next few years.

Yes, Flash will be replaced by HTML5 canvas.

Much like notepad was replaced by dreamweaver... I still prefer notepad.

~Sol

Writing a website in your medium of choice is one thing, but your audience should dictate what you actually produce from your tools. Imo flash is going to become less and less supported, and replaced entirely by HTML5.

I don't know if it will be a fast change (web technology moves very fast) or a slow one as flash is currently rooted widely within the web.

But one thing i'm 100% sure of is it will be replaced.