Designing a site in a graphics programs gives you a great deal of creative liberty. You can break out from the old mold of vertical and horizontal alignment and into much more organic forms. It is also the preferred media for artists who want to show their work. All quality graphics programs allow you to create not only pages but navigation bars, rollover buttons, and other special effects that Dreamweaver cannot. For simplicity sake we will use Firefox in this class, but any graphics program will have export-to-HTML functions. Once you export the page you can easily edit it in Dreamweaver.
It is important to point out limitations of designing this way. Because graphics create pages that are more visually complicated with pieces that fit into one another, text frequently becomes the secondary portion of the page. When a portion of text that is larger than the inital space is inserted the graphic layout 'explodes' leaving large gaps between pieces. Careful slicing and layout will help minimize these problems.
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