Design a website for free!
You (our loyal readers) asked us for more tutorial features, and here we are delivering the goods as requested. Coming up in issue 257 (on sale 30th August) we’re having a go at launching a website with WordPress. Chances are you’ve visited dozens of sites built on this open source blog publishing platform, and we’re going to show you how to do it yourself.
Going further afield towards full on web design and maintenance there are plenty of superb free applications for beginners and more advanced webmasters can take advantage of. This weeks Web pack release is a run down of our personal recommendations.
Follow these links for our other ‘issue 257′ web packs:
PC Format’s guide to alternative free operating systems!
Issue 257 game demo roundup!
WordPress
Of course heading up our list this morning is the wonderful Wordpress, the blogging platform inspiring this very blog post. Essentially the idea behind WordPress is to give anybody the tools to broadcast their voice on the Internet through an easy to launch and maintain blog-based website. Once up and running, content updates and editing is through an easy-to-manage content management interface, so basically through any web browser on any operating system. (free version)
Download from here
AceHTML Free
Aimed at the coding fraternity that want more than Notepad but still want to get hands dirty at ground level of Web programming, AceHTML is an excellent free choice. The software is a mix of coding by hand and taking advantage of built-in code helpers for form creations, images maps, tables, frames, and media elements. (free version)
Download from here
CoffeeCup Free HTML Editor
This free HTML editor teases you with a Visual Editor tab for full drag-and-drop editing, sadly it’s only available if you buy the fully fledged edition of the software. That aside, this is a pretty powerful bit of kit for coding purists. An arrangement of tabs set vertically along the left of the main window provide access to code snippets and code tags. These are further separted into categories for HTML, XML, PHP and CSS subcategories. It’s the perfect addition for everyone learning to code Web languages. (free version)
Download from here
FastStone Photo Resizer
FastStone Photo Resizer reduces the effort footprint involved with batch processing images. It’s many features make it ideal for handling web images such as format conversion, compression settings, file rename, resize, trim, watermarking and more. (free version)
Download from here
Free Monitor for Google
Getting noticed on Google take some clever strategic thinking which involves the content on your website such as keywords. This tool can track your Google position based on keywords and useful for researching opportunities to improve website ranking. (free version)
Download from here
JAlbum
JAlbum is a complete web gallery generator. Select your images, choose a gallery layout theme and finally, generate the gallery. The software incorporates FTP so you can publish directly to your website in the same process, or host it free on the developers servers. (free version)
Download from here
NetObjects Fusion Essentials
This is a powerful bit of web designing kit targeted at the WYSIWYG crowd. Getting started is made easy through the wizard, laid out catering for both personal and business web sites. You’re walked through a series of simple stages to outline the basic features of the site. Moving on to actual editing – everything is developed with drag-and-drop ease, though HTML editing is possible for any element fine tuning. Other features include a visual site manager and SiteStyles feature that can transform the entire look of your pages at any time by applying pre-set graphic styles. Overall, rather impressive for a free package. (free version)
Download from here
Paint.NET
You maybe wondering why The GIMP has been omitted from this pack. Personally, as good as it is, I find it’s overkill for many image editing and processing tasks. My choice is Paint.NET, it’s a mighty image editor packed into a small package. (free version)
Download from here
Total Validator Tool
This program gives your HTML code the once over, checking for HTML standards compliance, broken links and spell checking. (free version)
Download from here
WebDwarf
Of all the software we’ve highlighted so far WebDwarf may not be the best, but is the simplest WYSIWYG web page design solution of the lot. You’d be hard pressed to even recognise this as a Web page layout program, acting completely like a basic DTP application and no hint of HTML code to be seen or mentioned. Building pages takes no more effort than selecting the the text or image box, inserting the content, and dragging it around the page for placement. Beyond the built-in FTP client, WebDwarf has very few features and pages are kept from being anything more than image and text layouts. (free version)
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Posted on Thursday, August 18th, 2011 at 8:37 am under Web Packs. You can subscribe to comments. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.
Tags: Splash Damage
