One of my primary motivations for starting this blog was to share some of my techniques and favorite tools for creating websites. Recently I’ve been building almost every site in Wordpress, whether it be blog based or not. In a future post, I’ll give my ‘no brainer’ method for quickly setting up a CMS style site in Wordpress, but sometimes you need to break out the HTML editor and get your hands dirty!

I’m a big fan of Dreamweaver and Photoshop and they form the cornerstone of my studio, probably for the simple reason that I’ve been using them for so many years. If you’re new to creating websites though, and don’t want to spend thousands on software tools don’t worry – with these opensource tools you can start building great looking, functional websites in no time.

Nvu HTML Editor

Nvu (pronounced N-View) is a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) HTML editor based on the old Composer editor from the Mozilla Application Suite. It’s actually discontinued now but that doesn’t make it any less useful. Nvu complies with W3C’s web standards and by default pages are created in accordance to HTML 4.01 Transitional and use CSS although these are all user selectable. There’s also a built in validator which uses W3C’s online validation tool to check for compliance.

While Nvu might lack many of the features found in high end products such as Dreamweaver, it’s still a very powerful application, more than capable of creating fully functional and professional looking web pages. It’s also very compact, the Windows installer being just 6.6Mb, and easily carried on a USB pen drive.

While Nvu is no longer supported, Kompozer is a community driven project based on Nvu and freely available from Soundforge. It has a bunch of newer features such as a new auto spell checker and can create slightly cleaner code with less annoying <br> tags. That being said, it’s still Nvu that I carry on my USB stick because it’s so quick and easy to use.

GIMP Image Editor

The GIMP, or Gnu Image Manipulation Program, is the perfect partner for Nvu and a great substitute for Photoshop. This really is a superb package capable of everything from touching up photos and converting file formats to creating animated GIFs.

Photoshop users, especially those used to Microsoft Windows, may take a while to get used to the user interface as each individual window (such as the toolbar or color palette) are displayed in their own, separate window. This can lead to confusion with windows getting hidden behind each other, but once you get used to the interface you’ll soon realise the power of this incredible free software resource.

GIMP saves to it’s own native XCF format but is also compatible with a wide range of useful formats including JPEG, PNG, GIF, TIFF and Photoshop PSD making it perfect for web authoring and editing templates.

FileZilla FTP Client

While uploading files is pretty straight forward from within Windows these days, a dedicated FTP client still comes in handy and makes many jobs a lot easier. There are plenty to choose from, both free and commercial, but FileZilla is a great starting point and will cope with pretty much anything you ask it to do – and of course it’s opensource so it won’t cost you a penny!

Audacity Audio Editor

We’ve looked at tools to create HTML web pages, create/edit and add images and upload everything to your server but there’s one thing missing… Audio! Audacity is a fully functional recorder and image editor, great for podcasting or adding music and voice to your projects. Capable of importing and exporting WAV, AIFF and MP3 among others it’s the ideal partner to the other opensource web authoring tools mentioned here. It’s also very intuitive to use and although I have a commercial editor installed on my desktop computer, I very often open Audacity to do a quick job because I find it so quick and easy to use.

Build sites for free

Of course, some of the top end packages have more features and are more powerful than the applications discussed above, but they come with a price tag to match. In my 1 Day Webmaster seminars I teach my students using these packages exclusively and they create some astounding sites. If you’re just getting started online, if you’re wanting to learn how to create websites, or if you just want to save your hard earned cash then these packages will serve you well. You can always move to commercial packages later if the need arises but to be honest, you’ll probably find you can do everything you want with these!