Recommended Resources for WebMasters

As a web site owner there are some basic items of software that you will need form the start, and your income rises there are many more packages which will help you with setting up more complex and ineractive sites than most of us can achieve at the start.

Here are a few of our favourite applications for those new to web site creation:-

Graphics Manipulation

PhotoShop Elements - The great value entry version of Adobe PhotoShop which is the leading apckage for creating web graphics. Buy it and use it to create great header panels for your sites, and to resize and optimise each image before you insert the image inot html code.

Free software that will do most of what Elements will do can be found so buying Elements is not essential. At ConsumerReport our favourite is Paint.net.

Web Page Creation

Dreamweaver - Due to the lack of a cut-down low cost version this is not the most likely acquisition for anyone other than those with plenty of cash or a company budget, as the cost of this program is in excess of £300. This is a full professional package and very powerful. However, it may seema little daunting to the newby to web site creation.

NetObjectsFusion - from the same stable as 123Reg and WebFusion comes this very capable web site authoring package, which has been used by many WebMasters very successfully for about the last 10 years. For those on a budget you can obtain old versions of this software which still work well and are available free! It is great for newcomers and for getting a really good looking web site up fast.

XSitePro2 - What all new webmasters want is web traffic and to succeed in gaining traffic the first step is on-page Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). The preceding web site creation software packages were written by experts in web programming and especially in the HTML scripting which is at the core of creating web pages. XSitePro is a more recent offering which was written by a SEO expert and includes help and guidance throughout in SEO. At ConsumerReport this is our favourite for this reason as we love the ease with which it will bring you search engine rankings.

However, if you want a free HTML Editor you could do worse than use Kompozer, which is almost identical to the better known NVU.

Recommended Web Sites for Web Site Owners

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