The Right Tools
| Introduction The Basics The Right Tools A Page Template Formatting text Making a list Using colors and backgrounds Glossary |
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To accomplish anything you need
the proper tools. The basic tools for html design are few and free.
If you are using any flavor of Windows, you already the the most basic
one, an editor program. Good old Windows 3.1 Write (which became Wordpad
in Win 95 and 98) is entirely adequate for your first attempts. At work, I use a fancy html editor called Homesite. I love it. But it's a sophisticated program with hefty memory and disk space needs. On my old slow hard disk challenged laptop at home I just use Wordpad. So I recommend that people not worry about sophisticated html editors. Just use any text editor that will let easily you save your work as plain text. Unfortunately, this lets out most of the widely used word processing programs. Word and WordPerfect will both let you save a document as plain (or DOS ASCII) text, but you have to go through several steps to do it, EVERY time you save the document. With Wordpad, you specify the desired format the first time you save your work and after that it will always save it in the same format. The next tool you need is an ftp program. ftp stands for File Transfer Protocol. ftp has been around virtually forever, in Internet terms. It's one of the first tools that was developed at the beginning of Internet time to allow university and military researchers to exchange files with each other. You'll use a vastly updated version of it for Windows which you can download from many sites. I recommend WS_FTP. There are many others, and many opinions as to which is easiest to use. I always prefer the program which gives you the most control over what you are doing, and in my opinion, that is WS_FTP. Download the LE version of it from any of the popular shareware sites such as tucows.com, download.com, shareware.com or jumbo.com. The only other tool you will need is some sort of graphics editor. You don't need that to just get started, but few people are happy for long with a page that has nothing but on it text. Again, there are many free ones. If you have Windows 95 or 98, you can use the Kodak imaging program (look under Accessories). This is adequate for manipulating already created graphic images or photographs, but limited in its ability to create new ones. If you have the WordPerfect Suite 7 or 8, or WordPerfect 2000, you can use the Presentations program to create and edit graphics. That wouldn't be my first choice, but it's adequate to be getting started with. If you have a scanner and plan to incorporate scanned images, such as photos, you probably already have some variety of photo editing software that came bundled with the scanner. These programs are useful for manipulating photo images but are often awkward to use at best, and not optimized for graphic editing in general. The best program I can recommend is called Paint Shop Pro. Unfortunately, it is not free, though you can download a demo version of it for free from any of the common shareware sites. The demo version does everything that the full version does, but it will stop working after 30 days. If most of the graphics you anticipate using come from clip art sites on the net, or from a scanner with photo editing software, you may not need anything more than you already have. There are literally thousands of sites where you can find buttons, boxes, lines, arrows, balls, you name it, free for non-commercial use. Just look for 'clip art' in any search engine and you'll find more than you could look at in a lifetime. I designed web pages for two years before acquiring my first demo copy of Paint Shop Pro. Now I enjoy designing my own graphics as well, but I'll reiterate that it is not necessary to have a full- blown graphics program in order to incorporate beautiful graphics on your site. Previous page - The Basics Next Page - A Template for your site |