Software?

[forza rovers]

is there any free good software for web design?

[tetsujin1979]

depends on what you want to do?
Eclipse - http://www.eclipse.org - has some decent free plugins for HTML page design

[pól-dcfc]

is there any free good software for web design?

It also depends what you mean by free. Dreamweaver is great, and can be obtained for free from many sources, illegally. If you are confident you won't get caught, it's an option to consider. Morally reprehensible, yes, but the prices some companies charge for software are obscene.

[A face]

There is a free product that is similar to (but not as good as) Dreamweaver, but i cannot for the lift of me remember it. I have it installed on an old PC, i should be logging onto it at the weekend and i'll let you know.

Been ages since i used it aswell

[A N Mouse]

Narrow it down a bit.

What kind of coding are you doing (client/server)? And what do you want to do (blog/forum etc)?

Can't go wrong with a good text editor - http://notepad-plus.sourceforge.net/uk/site.htm

eclipse might be overkill for simple client side stuff, but might be useful for server side coding (perl, php, python, ruby). Also consider netbeans - http://www.netbeans.org/downloads/
MS have the express versions of their products - http://www.microsoft.com/exPress/download/

For databases you might also want to look at the sql server express (above), or mysql - http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/mysql/5.1.html

Then if its server side development you're doing you'll also want some kind of server. IIS should be available on your window install or download (think that site also has packages for it)- http://www.iis.net/
Or apache - http://www.apache.org/

Then you got stuff for bloging, content management, forums, javascript libaries
- http://wordpress.org/
- http://expressionengine.com/
- http://www.phpbb.com/
- http://jquery.com/

Also look at preconfigured software stacks - http://bitnami.org/stacks
- http://www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp.html
- http://www.wamp5.com/en/index.php

As well as all your browsers you want something for hoking about under the hood - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1843

You'll probably want to do some image manipulation at some point
- http://www.gimp.org/windows/
- http://www.getpaint.net/
and for vectors - http://www.inkscape.org/download/

[paul_oshea]

stay away from the microsoft stuff, Tomcat or Jboss will do fine for server side stuff, you could even run weblogic on dev licence for free at this stage!

id stay away from netbeans as well.

[forza rovers]

thanks all