Tools Introduction

To build and run a website, there are some tools you cannot do without. This section lists all the tools you absolutely need, plus some others that'll just make life easier for you. If you were to buy the popular commercial graphics and HTML authoring software - you could spend well over £600 acquiring the list below.

Some of the products mentioned below are part of a suite of web design tools from a particular manufacturer. Many companies offer a 'one-stop-shop' for programming tools. Their products are often excellent, but I wouldn't recommend you buy any commercial software until you have completed the course...

You need to learn the underlying technology of the internet first, before you'll know what tools suit you. You'll probably find it helpful to use the simpler tools and move up to more complex software later on. Most commercial web-design software is so full-featured, it's complicated and quirky. You'd be spending most of your time learning the product, not the underlying technology.

You may think that in order to get good quality, you have to pay for it. In most cases that's true, but with software - sometimes it's the opposite... The Internet is full of top quality free software, either freeware - where an individual writer just gives it away for one reason or another, or open-source where a community of programmers (which anyone can join) work together on different bits of a project - usually in their spare time.

Contrary to what the software vendors would have you believe - you rarely need to spend much (or any) money on software. The Linux operating system, for example, is the foundation on which a lot of the Internet runs. It's an open-source version of Unix. Most of the Linux webservers out there don't have a single piece of commercial software on them!

You may think that commercial software is better supported than free software - and sometimes this is true, but not always. It's common these days for software vendors to offer a separate support contract which costs you more. Very few companies offer unlimited access to free technical support. If you do buy commercial software - you need to check what you're getting when you buy the product.

All open source software, on the other hand, has the support of the community which is involved in writing the software. The most common method of getting support is to post questions to a technical forum. Helpful souls browse the forum and answer questions. You can usually find the answers to any questions in the archives of such forums. If you type technical terms into any search engine - you often get results from technical forums.

It is, of course, ultimately up to you to choose your tools. Wherever a particular program stands out from the crowd, we'll say so. Otherwise, you'll probably find that you need to work with a few different ones for a while until you can decide which is the best for you...

The first program to get - if you don't already have one - is a download manager which will speed connections and reconnect interrupted transfers (e.g. if your connection's lost)...