dougv.com | The Web home of Doug Vanderweide

A common question on Yahoo! Answers is how to go about making a Web site.

Generally speaking, people asking that question are best off using templates provided by Web hosts such as Freewebs, Geocities, WordPress or Blogger; these systems take out the guesswork and make otherwise complicated design tasks relatively easy.

But sometimes, the questioner is really asking where to find good, free Web site building tools. Fortunately, there are still lots of free tools available out there, many every bit as good as software costing hundreds of dollars a copy.

Plain Text Editors

No programmer should be without a decent plain-text editor. More important than anything is the ability to wade in to your code and straighten out the messes that every WYSIWYG editor will inject into your page.

In Windows, you can get by on Notepad, but the best text editing tool I’ve found is Notepad++.

In addition to properly formatting UTF-8 files (Notepad mistakenly adds a byte-order mark), Notepad++ includes syntax highlighting and folding, line numbers, advanced search and replace including support for regular expressions, autocomplete, tabbed documents, drag-and-drop editing, macros and more.

Believe me, the first time you mess up a file by accidentally doing an ill-advised global replace, you’re going to appreciate the power of Notepad++. It’s a must-have.

In all honesty, I prefer OS X over Windows Vista and would work on a Macintosh all the time, were it not that Apple’s hardware is generally wanting and significantly overpriced, Apple’s developer support would be a laughingstock were its deficiencies not so serious, and therefore it’s difficult to find good software for the Mac.

But when it comes to making simple Web sites, I will occasionally do so entirely on a Mac, since there are plenty of quality Web tools out there.

One such product is TextWrangler, made by Bare Bones Software.

TextWrangler isn’t as useful for HTML editing purposes as Bare Bones’ BBEdit is, or as BBEdit Lite, the discontinued freeware version of BBEdit, was. But in my estimation, the few added benefits you get from BBEdit vs. TextWrangler — syntax folding, code validation, etc. — doesn’t justify BBEdit’s $125 price tag.

HTML WYSIWYG Editor

There’s no question here: The best freeware HTML editor is KompoZer, a version of the popular nVu Web editor. (It looks to me like development on nVu has officially ended; no new release since 2005 is not a good thing.)

KompoZer should look and feel familiar to people who have used Adobe Dreamweaver. It’s not nearly as powerful as Dreamweaver — for example, KompoZer doesn’t author server-side code or have built-in JavaScript “behaviors” — but file management and the interface are startlingly similar.

Best of all, KompoZer has versions for Windows, Mac and Linux.

Image Editing

As much as I like Spartan Web sites, every site needs pictures at some point. And successful image editing requires more than Paint or iPhoto; it requires an image editor that can handle layers, so you can perform advanced tasks such as masks.

To this end, there’s really only one answer: GIMP. It’s the only free image editor I know of that fully supports layers. Although it’s not as extensible as Photoshop, and using advanced editing features in GIMP can be difficult, it’s by far the most powerful image editor available for free, and it has Linux, Mac and Windows versions.

In addition to GIMP, I recommend IrfanView as a second image editor. IrfanView supports the .ICO format, so making favorite icons is a snap. It also has batch converting; when you need to resize lots of photos to the same dimension or format, you’ll find this invaluable.

Unfortunately, IrfanView is available for Windows only.

Drawing

Sometimes, you need to make an illustration from scratch. Technically, you can do so with GIMP or IrfanView, but once again, the right tool for the job makes a huge difference, and Inkscape is the right tool for drawing.

Because it is an SVG editor, you can make very good 2D images with Inkscape. Its GUI and workflow feel a lot like Illustrator, so if you have experience with that, you’ll probably find Inkscape very familiar.

PDF Creation

Sometimes, you need to make PDFs of various customer-supplied documents. I am an avowed fan of Adobe Acrobat and believe that if you are going to work with PDFs, you should get a copy of at least Adobe Acrobat Standard because it offers many features, such as form creation, that prove invaluable.

However, most Web designers simply need to make a PDF from a Word document once in a while. For that, I recommend PrimoPDF.

Primo PDF is basically a “virtual printer.” Whenever you want to make a new PDF, you just “print” your document, select the Primo PDF virtual printer, save the PDF wherever you want it to go, and you’re done.

Give Back

Most freeware / open-source developers — myself among them — do what we do because we enjoy helping others, believe it’s our duty to give back to the developer community and believe that good software is built by communities improving each others’ work.

But there are precious few of us who don’t appreciate a donation. Simply put, the more donations we get, the more we can work on our “free” projects. But without donations, we must turn to paying work, and put our public service aside.

If you’re making money from free software, you’re morally bound to pay something to the developers of that free software, even if it’s only a few dollars. But even if you aren’t making money, if you like something, you should contribute to it — if not money, then assistance (every freeware project needs some sort of help) or passing on a good word.