Have you ever tried to start a project or assemble a piece of furniture when you don’t have the right tools? If you have then you know that you’re in for hours of frustration and a lot of valuable time lost trying to get the job done. Starting a web site is the same as starting any other type of project. You need to have the right tools available. While there are a number of very powerful commercial applications to choose from, the good news is that there are also a lot of free shareware programs available on the Internet to help you get started. This article will introduce you to a few of the tools that you’ll need before you start to build your web site.
HTML Editors
When I first started doing web sites there weren’t a lot of graphical HTML editors to choose from. The program of choice was a simple text editor, like Windows Notepad, and hours of typing HTML code and testing it out. This took a lot of time and troubleshooting problems wasn’t very easy. Fortunately, today’s web developers have a wide range of WYSIWYG (What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get) HTML editors to choose from. This means that you can create your web pages in much the same way that you would type a document in a Word Processor and the program will write the HTML code for you. Some of the more popular commercial tools are:
- Adobe Dreamweaver
- Microsoft FrontPage
- Microsoft Expression Web
- NetObjects Fusion
- Site Studio
- CoffeCup HTML Editor
My personal favorite is Microsoft FrontPage. Although FrontPage has been discontinued and replaced by Microsoft Expression Web, you may still be able find a copy on eBay or Amazon.com.
Graphic Utilities
Over the years the Internet has changed from largely text based medium to a more graphical one. Graphics are used for a wide range of things such as putting up pictures on your site to creating logos and colorful menu buttons. If your web site is going to use any type of graphics you’re going to need an image editing program. There are several image editing and manipulation programs that are available from high-end commercial programs to slightly less powerful shareware programs. You may also find that your computer came preloaded with some type of graphics editing program when you purchased it, like PaintShop Pro. Some programs to chose from are:
- Adobe Photoshop
- Macromedia Fireworks
- Marcomedia Freehand
- PaintShop Pro
- CorelDraw
- Abode Illustrator
- Ulead Cool3D
- Xara 3D
Once you’ve chosen your HTML and graphics editors you’ll be ready to start designing your web site. As your site grows and you decide to add more features and interactivity, you’ll find that there are a number of other types of programs you may want to look into such as Adobe Flash, CSS Editors, programming tools (like Visual Studio or Visual Web Developer) or tools for creating movies and steaming media. Soon you’ll have a powerful set of tools to keep your web site fresh and exciting.
Most software programs offer some type of trial version on their web sites and I would highly recommend using these to see which program is right for you before spending any money.