Resources
Since a large part of my website design service is educating people, I added this page to help you with some of the aspects of website design and development. Many people like to do things themselves, and web design is no exception. Following is a list of web design software, image editors, text editors, browers and ftp programs that are either free or available as limited time trials. You will not find any links here for frontpage, as building a site with frontpage is like typing with your feet (it's not real practical for most people, and you won't get good results).
How I Do It
I build most of my sites with HTML Kit, and I use css to have total control of the layout and appearance of the site. One thing people don't understand about website design is that you don't need a lot of expensive programs to make it work. With some free, basic software and understanding of css and html, you can build a really nice site.
So, without further ado, here is my top ten list of freeware/sharware/use-it-anywhere programs for building websites. They are in no particular order. (drumroll please...)
Bill's Top Ten
- Pix Resizer
- This is FREE software that allows you to quickly resize one or many photos. Very cool.
- Filezilla
- Filezilla is an open source (FREE) FTP (file transfer protocol) program. You use an FTP program to upload and download files between your computer and your website.
- Firefox
- Firefox is a standards compliant web browser. What this means is that it works, and it works well. Internet explorer comes standard with most computers, but it really is inferior to Firefox and other browsers, like Opera, Safari, and, well, any other browser out there. Basically, Explorer sucks and should be avoided at all cost (or even no cost). You've probably heard the expression "You get what you pay for". In the case of internet explorer, you get crap. Okay, moving on...
- Thunderbird
- Thunderbird is a FREE email client. It is made by the same people who brought you Firefox, and is much better than Outlook. It's not really a requirement for web design, but I just thought of it and threw it in my list.
- Nvu
- Nvu is a really cool, free website builder. In fact, I recently built a site for a client so that they could edit the pages themselves with Nvu. How cool is that?
- Notepad ++
- Notepad++ is a FREE text editing program, and I use it for most of my work. If you are fluent in html and css, this is almost all that you need. Please do not use Word to do any text editing for your website design, as it adds extra things that will mess up your pages.
- The Gimp
- The Gimp is a FREE image editing software. I have not personally used this program, but it is supposed to be good for basic image manipulation. Try it out, and let me know how it works for you.
- PhotoPlus
- This is freeware by Serif software, and is also an image editing program. Once again, I have not tried it.
- Colors on the Web
- This is a very cool site, that is free to use. If you want to find a color scheme for your site, try it out.
- HTML Dog Finally, here is a site that has lots of information on html and css, for those of you just starting out. That completes my top ten list. I hope you enjoyed it.