Tools of the Trade

There are many tools one can use to build a website: from basic things like Notepad to full on professional (which means expensive!) applications like Dreamweaver and Visual Studio. Then there are the cheaper/free and Open Source things like Notepad+++, NVU etc. At toeinwater, we will use anything and everything necessary to deliver a site everyone is happy with.

On top of all that, there are also tons of ready-made applications for building a site that come under the heading of CMS (Content Management Systems). These take out a lot of the work involved in setting up a site, replacing it with easy to use tools akin to a word processor. The real skill with these things, however, in order that your site doesn't look like everyone else's, is coming up with a unique design and implementation.

Then there are the ready to roll blogs like blogger, wordpress, dasBlog, BlogEngine.net etc. Indeed, this site was built entirely using BlogEngine.net, with various bits hand-coded in Visual Studio to craft the look I was after.

Having said all that, for those that are interested in such things, here is a list of the tools we use on a daily basis. Note that items marked [*] are either freeware or Open Source, with everything else being full-blown commercial applications:

Graphics / Design

  • Adobe Photoshop
  • Adobe Illustrator
  • Adobe InDesign
  • Xara
  • Inkscape [*]

Web Pages

  • Microsoft Visual Studio
  • Adobe Dreamweaver
  • PHP Designer Professional
  • weBuilder 2008
  • PSPad [*]
  • Notepad +++ [*]

CMS / e-Commerce / Blog Systems

  • DotNetNuke [*]
  • Drupal [*]
  • Zen Cart [*]
  • osCommerce [*]
  • Wordpress [*]
  • dasBlog [*]
  • BlogEngine.net [*]

Utilities

  • FileZilla FTP [*]
  • SqlDBX
  • XML Notepad [*]

Databases

  • mySql [*]
  • MS sqlServer
  • MS Access

The above list is by no means exhaustive . . . . . !