My new company is in the later design stages of our ecommerce website and we will be seeking a web developer shortly. My colleague and I are considering building a shell of our website in Site Designer to layout the fields and navigation, so that our web developer has a good idea of what we are envisioning and a head start on the development.

Can anyone tell me if the pages that are created using SiteDesigner can later be edited with web development tools like Visual Studio .net? I know we won't be able to go back to using Site Designer after we modify the pages, but that is ok. The real mystery for me is to understand the finished product of Site Designer and whether they becomes "compiled" pages or contain only open source code.

I would stay away from site desiginer as your web developer will probably not use it as you said. Instead, use PhotoShop or Fireworks to mock up your layout. Most developers (including myself) do all of their general visual layouts in an image program and then prepare it for the web when it's finalized.

Jason,

Thank you for your feedback. As a developer, do you know if it is possible to take a page that was created with a web building tool and build on top of it? The benefits of SiteDesigner, if this can be done, are that we can design the pages AND the navigation, saving a lot of explanation time when we transition from design to development. Are there any other tools that would accomplish both of these goals that you are familiar with?

Thanks again,
Steve

It's certainly possible to use SiteDesigner as a starting point. It generates HTML that can later be edited. Of course, after manually changing the pages, SiteDesigner won't be able to maintain it anymore.

But, it depends on your web designer as to his requirements. Many web designers will have some templates ready for use in new sites for most situations. SiteDesigner's output may or may not be useful and the web designer may want to recreate it anyway using his templates.

What else you might want to do is browse through Open Source Web Design and see if there are any designs that have the graphics and/or layout that you're looking for as examples.