I'm often asked by my visitors which tool I'm using for such-and-such a task (for example, web editing). This article attempts to answer the question with a list of some of the software I use regularly to develop and maintain my websites.
The list of software below are merely the programs I use. Don't rush out to get it just because I mentioned them. They may be buggy, may not work on your machine, may cause data loss, hair loss, earthquakes, and what-have-you. Or, they may simply not suit your style of working.
Even though this list is already very long, I've undoubtedly left out some important category or software. (And I'm sure it'll come to me one minute after I publish the article.)
You should also note that in the course of writing tutorials and reviews for my various sites, I also try out a large number of other tools belonging to the categories mentioned below. Those tools are not listed here since they are not my primary web development tools.
If you are reading this page because you want to find out how much it costs to create a website, you're on the wrong page. Please see the article "How Much Does It Cost to Set Up a Website?" instead, and then proceed on to the The Beginner's A-Z Guide to Starting/Creating Your Own Website to get started.
This page was written to satisfy the curious who probably already have some sort of website. They probably just want to see what others are using in case there's something useful that they can also get. Absolute beginners probably won't find anything relevant on this page.
It's probably no secret that my older sites, such as thesitewizard.com and thefreecountry.com, are hand-coded using a simple programmer's editor, rather than a full-blown WYSIWYG web editor. For this task, I'm currently using a commercial editor known as UltraEdit (trial). I've been using this editor for years, ever since my previous editor (CodeWright) became defunct.
Text editors are pretty much a matter of taste, and while there are many free programmer's editors around, I still like this one best. For now, anyway.
My newer sites like HowToHaven.com are maintained using the commercial
Adobe Dreamweaver CS3.
As mentioned in my article,
6 Things to Note Before Changing Your Site Design,
this program includes advanced site management tools that make maintaining a site very easy and efficient. In particular, its
template facilities allow me to change the design of
an entire site simply by modifying a single file; the editor updates all the relevant pages for me automatically. It also has a built-in ASCII text editor
with some conveniences for coding HTML that even my regular text editor cannot match. Personally, I don't think any of
the free WYSIWYG web editors available currently can even
come close to Dreamweaver's power and convenience.
My websites are always being modified. Even articles that were written years ago get updated periodically so that the information does not become hopelessly obsolete. I track changes I make to every page on my major sites using a type of program known as version control software. If you are a professional programmer (that is, you write programs for a living), you will probably be familiar with such things. The program keeps copies of old versions of my files, and allows me to retrieve them whenever I need them.
Windows Vista has primitive version control facilities built in, so if you use Vista, you may already have the ability to retrieve some older versions of your documents unless you have turned off Volume Shadow Copy (which you may have inadvertently done if you disabled System Restore).
For the most part, version control software is not needed for creating and maintaining a website, so there's no need to panic if you're not using any. If you are trigger-happy, and habitually make changes to your site that you regret, and wished you could recover the original version, such a program may come in useful. It may also be useful if you want a record of what your site contains at a particular point in time. Otherwise it's probably overkill.
In any case, I'm currently using TortoiseSVN, a free graphical Windows version of the well-known SVN version control system.
Although the editors I use have built-in search and replace capabilities, I prefer running a standalone program when I have to do complex search and replace operations across multiple files. A standalone program tends to have many more useful facilities than those that come with an editor. At present, I'm using a commercial (and expensive) tool known as PowerGrep (trial).
There are of course many other free text search and replace utilities available, although they don't offer the same scope and convenience.
However, not everyone needs a separate search and replace utility. If your site is one of those where you create once, and rarely ever modify, then chances are that your editor's facilities are more than sufficient. The utility also tends to be more useful (and more likely to be used) if you have some knowledge of regular expressions, since you will then be able to use its full power to extract information and transform them, sparing you the tedium of manual editing or writing a program to do the job.
One of the most useful tools that I've come across is a clipboard history manager. Although some editors have the ability to maintain multiple clipboards, I prefer to use a separate tool that gives me that facility no matter which program I'm running. At present, my clipboard manager of choice is a free program known as ClipX. There are also other programs of this type listed on the Free Clipboard Extenders and Clipboard History Managers page, but this particular one has exactly the feature set and user interface I want and no more.
Whether a clipboard extender is useful to you or not depends on how you work. Those who frequently paste multiple snippets from one window to another will probably find it handy. Without such a tool, you will have to repeatedly switching back and forth between those documents to copy and paste. For example, if you find yourself doing things like copy, switch, paste, switch, copy, switch, paste (etc), this tool will allow you to simply copy, copy, switch, paste, paste (etc).
As mentioned in my tutorial on
How to Create a Logo for Your Site the Quick and Easy Way, I use
Adobe PhotoShop CS3 Extended
to create what few graphics I actually display on my sites.
I don't have much to say about this program, since I hardly ever create or edit pictures and thus seldom use it. I suppose that given the few times I've needed it, I could have done just as well with one of the free image editors listed on the Free Image and Photo Editing Programs page. But my policy is to not skimp on things that may affect my productivity, so if a certain tool is the best of its kind for a task, I try to get it (where possible, within reason).
Although free FTP and SFTP programs are plentiful, I have been using
WS_FTP
since I started my first website. It works fine for me, so I've not seen any reason to switch to another brand.
There are times when I need to log into a shell account to perform certain tasks on my website. For such occasions, I use a free SSH client called Putty. It works well for my purposes, and even supports tunnelling, so I've not bothered to try out commercial equivalents, or for that matter, the other free SSH clients around.
Incidentally, if you are currently using a telnet client to log into your shell account, I suggest that you switch to an SSH client. They're more secure. Others can "eavesdrop" on your password and things like that if you use telnet.
(Before you ask, if don't know what telnet and SSH is, and you have had no reason to use them before, just ignore this entire category. Don't feel obligated to download a program just because I mentioned it. Different websites have different requirements.)
I don't really rely on the default web statistics software provided by my web host. Instead, I use a commercial log analyzer tool called Nihuo Web Log Analyzer Professional, since it provides a bit more analysis.
There are of course other log analyzers available on the Internet, such as those listed on the Free Web Log Analyzers page. If you don't mind using third-party (online) analytics, you can also check out the Free Web Statistics and Web Analytics Services page.
On occasion, where no software provides the information I want, I simply use a search tool to grep (ie, search using regular expressions) my logs to extract the relevant lines. It's a quick and dirty way to get one-off information for checking. If needed, I write a Perl script to do the job. But those times are rare.
I have already written about this nifty free tool, Sizer, in my article How to Test Your Website Under Different Screen Resolutions under Windows the Easy Way. It allows me to check my sites under multiple resolutions. For more details, please see that article.
If you don't already have a way to test your sites under different resolutions, you should get it. It's really handy. Unfortunately, it only works for Windows XP users.
I test my sites under these browsers (although probably not as regularly as I should): Opera, Firefox, Internet Explorer ("IE") 6 and 7, and on occasion (when I make drastic changes to my site design), Safari for Windows. Once in a blue moon, I also fire up a bootable Linux "live" CD to check the sites with Konqueror and Firefox.
Note, if you don't know how to run multiple versions of IE, please see my article How to Check Your Website with Multiple Browsers on a Single Machine (Cross-Browser Compatibility Checking).
I can probably go on forever, since, like you, I use many programs, some of which are probably only incidental to the main task of web development. However, instead of making this article tediously long, let me just refer you to the programmer and webmaster sections of thefreecountry.com. You may be surprised at the number of tools that are available for different tasks, making your development a tad easier.
Copyright © 2008 by Christopher Heng. All rights reserved.
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Which Software Do You Use for Web Development?
