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Website Design Resources

Software:

Editors

When I first started developing webpages, my first thought was to run out and spend $180 (Canadian Dollars) on FrontPage '98 but I am glad I didn't. Not to suggest that it is not a good program but it would have hindered my learning of the code. Furthermore, many HTML Editors and WYSIWYG HTML Editors even now do not yet support HTML4 very well or sometimes not at all.

Text/HTML Editors

• My favourite editor is EditPadPro. It is small, relatively cheap (although the EditPadLite is free) and fast.
• I am testing out Stone's WebWriter which has some great features but some of the ones that I like in EditPad, it does not have. On the otherhand, it has features that EditPad Pro does not have. Both are good but neither are perfect.
• I have tried HTML-kit but was not happy with all of its features. Others do like it though.
• I had tried 1st Page 2000 and it is very much like HTML-kit above. I am curious as to what the next version will be like (almost a year overdue - university students, you have to give them a break).

WYSIWYG

I have tried a couple of WYSIWYG editors but have not been fully satisfied with them. They could be used to speed up website development and maintenance but I find that each of their weaknesses forces me to revert back to my text editors from where I find it difficult to go back to the WYSIWYS editor.

• My favourite is IBM's Websphere Home Page Builder. It is much cheaper than many of the others such as Dreamweaver, Front Page and NetObjects Fusion but it also seems to support HTML4 and CSS much better.
• I have used Front Page 2000 and although it has some useful features, I prefer the feature set and price of IBM's Websphere product above.
• I don't normally like to put down a product but I found that NetObject's Fusion (versions 4 and 5) to be abysmal products: if you are interested in spending that kind of money, go with Front Page or better yet, Websphere.

Graphics Software

Depending on the work I need to do, I will use any of:

• CorelDRAW - great for designing buttons, relatively simple graphics or desktop publishing;
• Corel Photo Paint - great for manipulating photos or bitmapped images;
• Photoshop 5 LE - better for manipulating photos but some other functions are a bit more difficult to use; or
• Fireworks - best for producing gifs, creating hotspots or slicing images

I have used GIMP for Windows: the Linux version is probably more advanced and stable but the Windows version isn't bad.

I have a HP 6350 scanner which I use for scanning photos, etc.

Browsers:

Given my interest in developing standards compliant websites, I should not have to use many browsers to test my work. However, even compliant browsers have bugs or weaknesses in their implementations.

I will use the following browsers to test my work (in this order):

• Opera
• Mozilla: because Netscape 6.x is based on Mozilla, I use just this one.
• Internet Explorer

Other Software

I have Apache for Windows installed on my system to test my pages on a webserver. I am currently running it on Windows 98 but I plan to upgrade to Windows 2000 so I can run IIS5 to test ASP

Files are uploaded to websites using Bullet Proof FTP.