What Tools to Use to Create Your Website?
Posted by Spyros Panagiotopoulos in Website Development Tools, tags: tools to create website, website creation tools, Website Development Tools
Having the best tools is probably the most important element to successfully creating your website. In this article i’ll be explaining the various tools that can be used in order to easily do the job. First of all, i need to stress out that it’s important to evaluate your own knowledge about website creation. Are you possibly able to code in HTML or CSS or such web programming languages? Are you a plain beginner and need to find a way to easily create a website without having to learn such languages? Whether you’re part of the first or the latter category, i’ll be explaining the efficiect way to do just what you’re looking for.
The non programmer variation
If you are not a programmer or you are and are just looking for easier ways to create a website, there are quite a lot of tools out there that can give you a hand into easily creating your sites. The most well known and probably better of them is Adobe’s Dreamweaver .
Dreamweaver has over the years managed to become the web standard for such tasks. Although it’s quite expensive, it allows you to easily build quite advanced websites with features like web forms, flash, area maps, button rollovers and many many more. You can take a look at the versatility of Dreamweaver watching this video:
I understand that most of you probably don’t have the budget to spend in order to obtain such a program, so i want to offer you some cheaper and free solutions too.
A good and less expensive alternative to Dreamweaver is considered by many to be CoffeeCup. It’s really a very good editor and you can also get a free trial at http://www.coffeecup.com/html-editor/download/ . If you are really into CoffeeCup, you may want to take a look at this introductory video too:
CoffeeCup was kind enough to create a totally free web editing tool that can be found at their website
( http://www.coffeecup.com/free-editor/download/ ).
Another great and free tool is Kompozer. A very nice open source html authoring program that i highly recommend. You can take a look at how to work with Kompozer here:
The semi-Programmer variation
I think that most people belong to this category. They do possess some basic and intermediate knowledge of the theme but want to learn more and be more effective into designing their website. Every webmaster, even if they are a programmer or not needs to know basic things about HTML and CSS the least. For a brief introduction about HTML, you can take a look at this tutorial:
In short HTML is the language that browsers understand and is able to present websites according to our coding. CSS, the Cascading Style Sheets are a great way to create certain designs defined by single css sheets and can be easily changed. The best place, in my opinion, to learn about HTML and CSS coding is definately http://www.w3schools.com/ , an absolutely outstanding webmasters resource totally free too.
Learning both of these technologies enables you to be able to edit your website files like a programmer would and be able to easily fix certain problems that come up regularly. It’s certainly time well spent.
The Programmer variation
If you’re a programmer already, you do have an edge on creating a website when compared to other webmasters. If you have programming experience and already know about HTML and CSS, it would be a great investment learning PHP and smarty. This way, you can create dynamic websites, like social networks, dating websites and such. Smarty is a great template system that should present you of a great way to organise your php code and representation. An introductory tutorial about smarty can be found at:
PHP and Smarty template system introduction
And of course, you may also want to check( and i highly recommend that you do ), the tutorials about php of w3schools.
If you don’t really want to mess with creating your website yourself, you could always hire a freelancer to do it for you at:
http://www.getafreelancer.com/
Many programmers are going to contact you if you put up an offer. Just make sure that you hire one that has quite good recommendations by other users.
Other nice web creation tools
Apart from the standard editors, there are some other issues that probably need some care too. For instance, how do you go about creating a logo for your website? Certainly, the best photo editing software to use is Adobe’s Photoshop, but it’s not only quite expensive to buy but quite difficult for a beginner to use too. Should you need such a powerful alternative though, you can always try the free GIMP that although it’s created for linux, it has a windows version too. Another great tool that i’ve used quite some times in order to create a logo, is Logo Creator priced at about 30 dollars at the time of writing this article. However, you can find a quite adequate trial version ( http://www.softpedia.com/get/Authoring-tools/Authoring-Related/The-Logo-Creator.shtml ) which seems to do everything the commercial one does 
Hope that i gave you some insight about the basic tools that can be used to create your website. Why not start creating it even now ?
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