Adobe Products for web editing and designing

I am frequently asked "Which Adobe package should I buy"? The Adobe site is the best place to find out, but this is a quick cheat-sheet.

Adobe InDesign is for printing / page layout – it replaces the functionality of PageMaker. It is not for web but would be useful for poster and brochure design.

Adobe Fireworks is an image editing product for web, not print media. It's particularly good with slices and other web-centric tasks.

Adobe Photoshop is for image and photographic editing, like Fireworks, except for both print and web.

Adobe Illustrator is for creating vector graphics - non-photographic scalable drawings.

Adobe Flash is for creating flash movies or special effects for the web.

Adobe Contribute is most similar to MS FrontPage – an easy-to-use page-oriented web editing tool that does NOT offer a code view. It doesn't have site edit tools, but it’s fine for doing text, links, inserting images. It is best used for those of our clients that edit web pages less frequently and who don’t want to see code.

Adobe Bridge is a media-manager over the top of Creative Suite that knits together the suite and provides centralized access for assets, searching, and settings.

See the Adobe Creative Suite site for figuring out which packages include which products.