Choosing the right website design software is important to anyone who's going to do website design for a living. The wrong software, or doing everything by hand, will lead to project development times that simply aren't tenable for professional web design project schedules.

On the flip side, the right software helps you learn new things much more quickly, or even do advanced website design tasks without learning them at all!

Below, we describe our favorite features of website design software. These are all features that save us several hours per project, on every project.

Doing website design without software boasting these features, as far as we're concerned, is like taking up landscaping with a pair of tailor's scissors and a plastic spork.

Template Systems

When you begin implementing each website, you should already have worked out a number of specific templates you'll use for each page. The best website design software gives you two features that greatly aid in fast deployment and fast editing of these templates.

The first, is the ability to create a custom template library, and the second, discussed further below, is the ability to create custom element libraries.

Take Youtube for example. Imagine you were going to create a Youtube-like site using straightforward HTML - not a good idea in practice, but a fine example for discussion of how website design software will help you do your job.

Youtube has templates such as:

• The video page

• The user channel page

• The featured page

• The user mail page

• The comments list page

...Etc. When you remove the per-page specifics from the video template, such as the actual video, the title, the comments, info box and related content boxes, what you get is a simple template that can be re-used millions of times.

Replace those items that you stripped-away with variables that can be filled-in on a per-page basis, and that's a template.

So, what makes it so important that your website design software has an excellent template system? Continuing with our hypothetical case of building Youtube by hand, let's say you get two million pages into the project, and your client wants you to change the font.

Without a great template system, you'd have to edit two million pages just to tweak a font.

With good website design software, you'll only change one file, and then tell the software to implement that change, site-wide. The change will take effect on every file you've already finished, while you go out to lunch.

Element Libraries

Similarly, there are often times when a repeatable item isn't a whole page template, but some smaller element such as a navigation menu.

Take the case of a website with multiple sections, and sub-sections. For a better user experience, you want your subsection menus to only appear in the related parent section - rather than have every menu appear on every page of the site.

Rather than make a new page-wide template every time there's a new combination of layout and navigation menu, your navigation menus can be stored, with good website design software, as a page element in a library.

Thinking again of the Youtube example, the Related Videos, Channel Videos, and Featured Videos would each be elements that can be swapped out. Without element libraries, your template system wouldn't save you much work.

Automatic Javascript

This feature doesn't come into play on as many sites as the two above, but we'd never dream of doing website design without software that offers automatic Javascript generation.

To create a simple roll-over effect such as a three-state menu, your options are:

• Without automatic Javascript: About an hour and a half of hand-coding, assuming you already know how to do it and have a code library on hand for ready-made implementation.

• With automatic Javascript: About five minutes.

The more complicated the behavior, the more time this feature saves you.

These are just three of our must-have website design software features. It doesn't do the job for you, but compared to doing things by hand, it's close enough!