Easy Steps to a Great Site

Web Editors: Your Web Toolbox

You don't need to have $5000 worth of software running on a $10,000 chunk of metal to put stuff on the Internet. Here's a quick look at tools for the Web in three categories: no-end, low-end, and midrange.

The free way: If you have Windows, you have Notepad. With a little experience, you'll find that making quick tweaks to a page in Notepad--or any other text editor--isn't particularly difficult. Two free text-editing programs that go Notepad one better are Fookes Software's NoteTab Light and Evrsoft's 1st Page 2000 2.

For a few dollars more: Many people avoid HTML altogether by using "what you see is what you get" (WYSIWYG) Web-design products. The most popular of these is Microsoft's $169 FrontPage 2002. If you want to create a lot of pages in a hurry (and you don't mind occasionally convoluted code), WYSIWYG is the way to go. Once you get comfortable with HTML, an editor such as Macromedia's $89 HomeSite 4.5, SoftQuad Software's HotMetal Pro 6, or CoffeeCup Software's CoffeeCup HTML Editor 8.9 makes a great addition to your toolkit.

Another step up: Macromedia's $299 Dreamweaver 4 is a favorite everyday tool of many professional Web developers. It enables you to see a page and its underlying HTML code simultaneously, and it includes a Flash button editor and a JavaScript debugger. Another popular tool is Adobe's GoLive 5, which costs $284.

Image editors: We used Macromedia's $299 Fireworks to create the contact menu for our site. Fireworks also includes tools for animating and optimizing images. Adobe's $99 Photoshop Elements can't quite match the Web-readiness of Fireworks, but it costs a lot less. Specialized apps like Ulead's $45 GIF Animator can be a great help, too.

One of the newest tools in the Web designer's arsenal is Macromedia's Flash 5 ($399), a vector-graphics program that produces animation files small enough to download quickly over a 56-kbps modem.

From here to there with FTP: Most browsers and HTML editors provide some type of FTP capability, but you may find that it's simpler and more effective to use an FTP client program such as Ipswitch's $40 WS_FTP Pro 7. A free WS_FTP Limited Edition has nearly all the functionality of the Pro version, but it's available only for noncommercial use.