There is a vast amount of tools that can be used in web development. In this blog I’m going to give you my opinions on a few of them.

Well, the first thing I’m going to talk about is the use of WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editors. One of the most common, and worst ones is Front Page. I haven’t actually used this product, but I’ve never heard someone speak of it highly. I’ve seen it ruin the code on pages (make really confusing a bad code), so I really don’t suggest that.

As a web developer, I don’t actually use WYSIWYG, but I do use Dreamweaver (DW). This is a great design tool and supports all languages besides ASP.NET. Unfortunately, DW isn’t free. If you have the money to get it, it’s got a lot of useful tools and I’ve been using it for years with very few problems. The older versions (not DW 8 ) also can create some messy code if you use the Design View, so if make sure you clean the code up after.

Microsoft Visual Web Developer 2005 Express Edition is a free WYSIWYG. Along that line, they have an express edition (means it’s free) of every language in Microsoft Visual Studio. They are apparantly not a powerful but I haven’t hit their limitation yet, and they’re great tools. They keep your code clean, and they do support ASP.NET (if you’re programming in ASP.NET, this is a must). The reason why I don’t use them all the time is they don’t support PHP, which is their one downfall. PHP is best run on Apache, which is best run on Linux, which is kind of Microsoft’s rival. If you want a free PHP WYSIWYG, I haven’t it before but I think PHP Designer 2007 – Personal is a good one.

Both DW and the Microsoft Visual Web Developer have built in FTP programs, but if you decide on another editor, or already have one that doesn’t include an FTP program, you may want to know a good one. Core FTP LE is a great free FTP program that I’ve used for various other reasons in the past and it works very well, so this is my suggestion.

Another unusual program that can come in handy is a better notepad. Sometimes, for various reasons, you may have to open a certain file in notepad instead of your editor. I’ve tried two, but was completely satisfied with Notepad++. It supports color coding for pretty much every language and some other really good features. It’s definitely my pick.

Graphic tools. There are many different graphics programs that may interest you, many are kind of pricey. My favorite is Adobe Photoshop CS2. It’s kind of complex, but really has the tools to help make great artwork. There are also many tutorials all over the internet to teach how to do pretty much anything with it, and it’s probably the most popular of the graphics programs.

Fireworks is the graphics program that comes in the Macromedia Suite. It’s very user friendly and integrates into the other Macromedia products nicely, but I don’t like it nearly as much Photoshop, even though it has a lot of functionality.

The next program I would go to, the only free one I recommend, is GIMP (pardon the name). It’s the only open source graphics program I know, and it’s supposed to have similar functionality to Photoshop. I didn’t like it because it seemed to be a bit more confusing and used several windows instead of one. I have, however, seen a lot of great artwork created with GIMP, so it’s definitely a good choice.

That’s it for now. There are more specific programs for specific areas of web development, but I will go into those later .

Until next time,
Kerry

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This entry was posted on Monday, March 19th, 2007 at 6:21 am and is filed under Web Design, Web Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.