Web Design Articles and Tutorials

Must-Have Web Software

By Dick Sowa

If you want to develop a successful web site, you will want a number of software tools at your disposal. While you might be tempted to use some of the free web-based options that many site hosts offer, you will still be better off designing your pages using these tools.

Good web site development takes a lot of planning and preparation. Standalone tools (like those I recommend below) will help you do just that.

Browsers

Install at least two browsers on your computer. Netscape (or Mozilla), Microsoft Internet Explorer, Opera, etc. Why? Because no browser is fully W3C compliant (although they will claim to be). But the most important reason, is to make sure your web pages display exactly the same for everyone. Once your design is completed, load the pages into each browser and see how it looks. If you haven't loaded your pages into different browsers before, you are in for a surprise!

I can't emphasize how important this is. If you write your pages to support only one browser, you will likely lose a significant portion of our visitors.

My Recommendation: Mozilla It is open source (meaning it is free) and it comes with lots of handy tools..including a JavaScript debugger that is worth it's weight in gold.

Text Editors

Plain text editors are simple programs that enable to you edit HTML without adding any special formatting functions. Do NOT use MS Word or Wordpad. They add all sorts of additional formatting functions to the file that you don't want. HTML WYSIWYG editors also enable you to edit the HTML in text mode.

You will still want to use a text editor to create and edit Cascading Style Sheet and JavaScript pages.

Notepad comes with all versions of Windows, and is all you will likely need. Notepad's only limitation, however, is the file size it can handle. If you want to edit larger files, a better choice would be either of the following popular ones:

NoteTab Pro http://www.notetab.com/
TextPad http://www.textpad.com/

My Recommendation: Stay with Notepad, unless you really need to edit large files, or don't use Windows.

HTML Editors

HTML editors allow you to create and edit your web pages. You can, of course, code your own HTML code manually using a text editor...but why spend time hand hacking code when you can make it fast and easy for yourself? Don't get me wrong, you will still want to hand hack SOME of your code. Why? Because most HTML editors add unnecessary coding, and will never include all the features you want to add to your site. For example, if you plan to us JavaScript or some other scripting language, you will definitely want to be able to code manually.

A caution: If you use a full featured WYSIWYG (What you see is what you get) editor, then expect it to make coding changes without your knowledge. They make assumptions about what you intended, and add code to complete common tasks. If you really want to make hard coded changes that won't be changed, then use a text editor.

Here are some popular HTML editors:

Microsoft FrontPage
Microsoft FrontPage A very popular and powerful WYSIWYG editor. Includes nearly all the features you would want (and many you can do without). Tightly integrated with other Microsoft products. Very popular among professional web designers.

Macromedia Dreamweaver
http://www.macromedia.com/software/dreamweaver/
A very popular and powerful WYSIWYG editor. Among professionals web designers, this is often the tool of choice.

Adobe GoLive CS
http://www.adobe.com/products/golive/main.html
A powerful WYSIWYG editor that is tightly integrated with other Adobe products (Acrobat, Illustrator, etc). A serious product for professionals.

Coffee Cup
http://www.coffeecup.com/html-editor/
A popular HTML editor that's great for beginners as well as advanced users. You can buy different modules that add additional functionality. Includes a built in browser that will enable you to instantly preview your HTML as you go.

Hot Dog Professional
http://sausage.com/products/index.html
Three editors are available, including HotDog Junior for children, PageWiz for the novice user and Professional for advanced and budding webmasters.

HTML-Kit
http://www.chami.com/html-kit HTML Kit is a free full-featured text editor designed to help HTML, XML, and script authors to edit, format, validate, preview, and publish Web pages. Newcomers to HTML coding can benefit from the program's error-catching abilities. Includes a handy free tool called HTML Tidy that does a great job of finding an identifying errors and improving formatting. While not as robust as the other programs I listed, it is handy to have around...and the price is right.

My Recommendation: Any of these will do a good job for you. FrontPage and Dreamweaver are the most expensive and most popular professional level tools. They will not let you down. Adobe GoLive CS is coming on strong and is worth considering. If you want to get into web design on a budget, then Coffee Cup and Hot Dog Professional are good choices. If you write JavaScript, then I also recommend you have Mozilla browser installed that comes with the open source "Venkman”, JavaScript debugger.

Email

Email is essential to your Internet Business. While you can go with web based email, a standalone product is critical if you want to have full control over your email.

The two most popular email program Outlook and Eudora. Using them, you can easily sort and filter your email, categorizing them into "mail boxes", etc. Outlook is tightly integrated with other Microsoft Products.

Eudora
http://www.eudora.com

Outlook
http://www.microsoft.com/

My Recommendation: Eudora...hands down. As a powerful email client, it offers every feature you can ever want.

FTP

File Transfer Protocol (FTP), is a what you will likely use to upload and download files to and from your web site.

Full feature editors will enable you to transfer your files to your web site (i.e. "publish" them), but they don't give you the flexibility to control what is on your site. FTP programs look and operate a lot like Windows Explorer...enabling you to make directories, rename files, etc. But most importantly, they enable you to upload files that your editor might not. These could include CSS, JavaScript, text files, etc).

The most popular FTP programs are:

CuteFTP
http://www.cuteftp.com/cuteftp/

WS_FTP
http://www.ftpplanet.com/download.htm

MY Recommendation: You can't go wrong with either one.

Graphics Editors

A graphics editor permits you to edit pictures, images and clipart. Graphic design can be intimidating subject for many web designers, but you must learn some basic design techniques.

Paint Shop Pro
http://www.jasc.com/
The most popular graphics program. Has it all, and is . If you only use one program, this is the one.

Adobe PhotoShop CS
http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshop/main.html
and
Adobe Illustrator CS
http://www.adobe.com/products/illustrator/main.html
These two products are the professional's choice for image and graphics design and editing. If you are serious about creating, editing and customizing pictures and graphics of all kinds, these are the products for you. While expensive, they are worth it if you do graphics for a living.

IrfanView
http://www.irfanview.com/index.htm
Primarily a graphics viewer, it is FREE and FAST. If all you have to do is resize an image or convert a JPG to a GIF with a transparent color, then this is the tool for you. Has some limited editing features, including color and brightness adjustments, cropping, etc.

My Recommendation: For serious web design work, Paint Shop Pro has it all. I also recommend IrfanView because you will often want to merely preview images and make minor adjustments to size and quality that don't require a more powerful program.

File Compression Software

If you want to send large files over email, or if you want to download files from the internet, you will a compression-decompression utility. You can compress one, or a group of files, and send them as a single attachment. Zip compression has been around a long time, and is the industry standard. To access a Zip file, you will need a compression utility to decompress it and save it as a normal file.

In recent years, competing compression formats have started to become popular, with even higher compression ratios than zip. You can't go wrong staying with zip format, but you should be aware that there are others being used and you might see them.

WinZip
http://www.winzip.com/download.htm
Full feature zip compression tool. The best in a large field of competitors.

WinRAR
http://www.rarlab.com/index.htm
Coming on strong, but not as mature as WinZip. It also handles most of the new compression standards including RAR, ACE, BZ2, JAR, and ISO.

Other Essentials

These are not tools for your computer, but they are available online for free, and you should make extensive use of them.

HTML Validation offered by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is a free service that checks documents like HTML and XHTML for conformance to W3C Recommendations and other standards.

CSS Validator offered by the W3C is a free service that checks Cascading Style Sheets form conformance to their Recommendations and Standards.

In summary, the tools you have, and how familiar you are with their use, will make all the difference in how easily you can create, maintain and update your web pages. In the end, the time you spend learning how to use them, and what their limitations are, will pay dividends in the success of your web site.