Is it possible to design a website completely in Fireworks?

Question

Just wondering if this is possible I used to be a engineering designer (& learned dozens of progams while in the field) & I'm trying to help my buddy with his new business building a website. I have no desire or need to learn code. Fireworks seems easy & I was wondering if it was possible to design a complete website in it?
I'm almost done with his site I exported it as html & images in Fw's CS5 the only problem I'm having is the layout is fixed. I clicked on the center button under the export options but it doesn't do anything?
I would also like the parts (header, nav buttons, images, & text boxes) to change as a proportion of the browser/screen size (I believe this is called flexible) but remain overall centered on all the pages.
Thanks for helping out the newbie, please let me know how I can return the favor it would be my pleasure.
-Brandon

Answer 1

I am re-designing our company's Website using (in order) PhotoShop CS5, Flash (with f4v fullscreen capable video), Fireworks and Dreamweaver CS5. I have always admired the appearance of websites created by graphic artists as opposed to non-artistic "code heads".  It is of course important that the site does not contain code errors or an oddball configuration that will cause it to fall apart when viewed in browsers like, Wheezer Von Hacktule's Web Shredder etc.  I'm a video editor, and can't be bothered with the quantum properties of a pixel and edit from the pixel on up as some of the code heads do.  And their sites look like it.  Look at some of the sites regulars in the Dreamweaver forum have put together... sorry to be a critic.
Trust me, unless you are designing Websites for a bank or some top secret government project, the visual design method IS the most quick and straight forward. Yes CSS.
Without going into a lot of detail:
You start your design with PhotoShop, carefully name your layers (lowercase and use underscores) and put them in order.  Make sure to include "white space" between your graphic elements.  When you are happy with the appearance, open the PSD with Fireworks.  Using the shape tool in Fireworks, create your divs. Give them names like top_head and side_buttons etc. and keep the shape "divs" on the lower layers in Fireworks just above your background.  Run the shapes to the outside edge of your design BUT allow space of about 5 pixels between the divs, keeping them separate. Use the slice tool to tell Fireworks what your exported images are going to be.  Be sure to name them in the Fireworks layer pallette.  Be careful that nothing overlaps the div shape container and that no slice overlaps on to another.  You can better see this by zooming way in on your design.  BTW Fireworks optimizes images for the Web, much better than PhotoShop.  Optimize each image according to its type, photographic, use jpeg, clip art-like images use gif.
Don't "slice" text areas you want to remain HTML text as opposed to an image of text.  Fireworks will automatically create that area as text upon export.
Export from Fireworks as CSS and images.
Open your html page in Dreamweaver.  Some things will be out of alignment.  That is where knowledge of CSS comes in.  Do your refinements in Dreamweaver.  You may need to go back to Fireworks and make some changes, then re-export.
OK, so I created a rather complex design and I saved it as a template.  I uploaded the design to our server and checked it in Adobe Browserlab as well as the W3C Markup Validation page.  No alignment errors across many browsers and zero code errors at the W3C Markup Validation page.