Website Design Tools

Although you could build a Website with nothing but a plain text editor, it sure makes life easier to use some professional tools to help you along the way. There are many top-quality software applications that produce professional results for no cost.

The first thing you will need is a quality WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) HTML editor to get your ideas down quickly. Here is a list of my personal favorites.

HTML Kit
http://www.chami.com/html-kit/download/

Netscape Composer
http://wp.netscape.com/communicator/composer/v4.0/index.html

Amaya
http://www.w3.org/Amaya/

It's also nice to have some sort of tool for your CSS. It can be exhausting to look at a large style sheet for too long. I recommend the following software to help you code and organize your cascading style sheets.

Top Style Lite
http://www.newsgator.com/NGOLProduct.aspx?ProdId=TopStyle&ProdView=lite

Once you put together your ideas, you may what to clean it up, optimize it, and make it dynamic with different languages such as PHP, ASP, CGI, and JSP. You will need a quality text editor that won’t bloat your text with formatting garbage. You may even want some auto-complete features to help you type redundant code faster. Here are the ones I would recommend.

HAPedit
http://hapedit.free.fr/download.php

TextPad
http://www.textpad.com

Obviously you will also want some pretty graphics to spice up your pages a bit. As far as I can find, there is only one high quality graphics editor available for free. This one can do just about anything you need.

TheGimp
http://www.gimp.org