sdesign2

This is very common. The issue is that the text in an editor sits on a page which has a bunch of css attached to it. Put the text on the 'live' page and you've got different CSS acting on it. With a bit of work, though, you can usually get the formatting of text in the editor to reflect the formatting of text on the page. The issue of having to hit return twice to get your space between paragraphs can be changed by configuring the editor. The developer should also provide styles which the clients can use e.g. we always provide a style for the intro paragraph. We quite often get requests to be able to justify text and do various other things and we persuade them they are not advisable as pages will very quickly start to look like a dog's dinner.

Pretty sweeping question but look into how joomla theming works and how to develop a new theme without touching 'core files'. If you start playing around with core files then any upgrade or update will potentially wipe your modifications. Learn how to work a layer above the core in the templates directory. The same applies to modules - never directly hack them. Dreamweaver then just becomes a glorified code editor which you can use for editing your template files. Of the CMS's you mentioned I'd order them by ease of learning as follows with quite a gap between Drupal and Joomla: Wordpress Joomla Drupal I'm guessing that the obstacle you came up with in cushyCMS isn't insurmountable and just typical of the kind of thing you come up against with any CMS. The more familiar you get with it the quicker you'll become at finding workarounds.

Ditto that - slowed our site down quite considerably and not that flexible.

In your template for that page if you want a different header you could use include(TEMPLATEPATH.'/header2.php'); ?> where header2.php is your header variant.

I would send back to the designer requesting (s)he supplies design which should be around 980px for content area with background image padding out sides as on this forum. If you're being provided with the design then I'm guessing it isn't your brief to make decisions about image sizes and text size.

We used mockingbird which is free for 1 project - quite like it and good for collaboration as client can type on it.

Hello all - looking forward to sharing ideas!

Karibu!