Top 10 favourite free web design and development tools
You can build top notch professional web sites using only free tools and the ones listed below are the tools I rate most highly. Each one of these tools does one thing and does it very well and they will never let you down. There are alternatives of course but at the end of the day we have plenty of choice among the plethora of top quality free software tools which can be used for serious work and experimenting.
PsPad
A super fast programmer's editor with an astonishing amount of features for people who love to code using light weight but powerful tools. It has line numbering, syntax highlighting and the all important bracket matching for PHP and CSS files. It also allows you to create a project from any directory on your hard drive and lets you create and reuse boiler plate template files for use your projects
Netbeans
Although it runs on Java and takes about half an hour to start up it has a great PHP debugger. You can also use it for C++, Java and Ruby development and the Netbeans web site has plenty of videos and written tutorials to get your teeth into
Firefox
The best web browser for web designers full stop. The firebug plug-in gives you x-ray eyes and is a life saver when you are tweaking your CSS. Most developers do all their development and testing in Firefox and then test their site on other browsers. For cross browser testing you can download windows versions of Safari, Google Chrome and Opera. Sometimes I use Windows XP service pack 2 which comes with Internet Explorer 6. I keep the installers for IE7 and IE8 in the My Documents folder and use them for testing. This of course means you need to re-install IE and re-boot for each browser testing session but this not a real problem because it is fast and does not stop you from doing your work. I would rather do this extra testing than exclude the 15% of IE6 users who visit this site
Xampp
A personal web server which runs as an Apache/MySQL/Php (AMP) stack. It comes packaged as a windows installer and is pre-configured to run like the Linux based versions used by your hosting company. Xampp also has PhpMyAdmin for creating and managing your MySQL databases and it has a nice little applet which sits in your task bar for easily controlling the server
Filezilla
This is the only tool I have ever used for uploading files to web severs using the FTP protocol and I don't see the need to use anything else. It just works
Screenhunter
A precision screen capturing tool which does exactly what it says. No frills screen capturing with magnified cross hair targeting giving you real time read outs of the x and y co-ordinates of your mouse pointer. Saved screenshot files can be tagged by date and or timestamp which is a great aid to short term memory recall when browsing your saved files folder
Gimp - A pixel image editor
For creating professional web graphics and optimising photos for web pages. Some people use it exclusively for graphics and serious photography and prefer it to Photoshop
Colorpic
A neat little application that allows you to capture and save colours from web pages without needing to open up heavyweights like GIMP, Photoshop or Fireworks. It allows you to create a palette and saves the palette with your chosen colours for later use.
Inkscape - A vector based image editor
A cool open source graphics application for creating vector images as opposed to the pixel based images you work with in GIMP et al. It is easy to learn and fun to use which makes it much less intimidating for beginners than programs like Adobe Illustrator.
Before I forget ...
I know I said there were only 10 applications on the list but that was just to catch your attention. There is actually an eleventh tool which I believe is the most important one of them all - the W3C validation service. Before you test a web page you need to ensure that your xhtml and css files are valid before you do your testing. If you work with valid xhtml and css then browser behaviour becomes more predictable and easier to control
