Essential Software To Build Websites

23 June 2010
Posted in Site Promotion

Here I will run through which software for internet marketing that you may need to construct websites. These tools are often free but some will cost money. Our needs will dictate which tools we require. Actually, there are often online alternatives for the tools but it make sense to be knowledgeable of what tools are worth using that run on your PC/MAC.

For a professional approach, I think we all want to be the master of our own websites so this will entail uploading files to the web . For this we should ideally use an FTP client. For this purpose I use FileZilla which surprisingly is free but does everything you require for file manipulation between a PC and your web hosting.

With this software, you can drag and drop files between folders in any of the 2 windows ( the web server or your HDD). Also, right-clicking on the server folders and files allows you to adjust the file permissions that determine who can do what with each file such as view it in a web browser or otherwise.

But, for bulk file deletions I find it a lot faster to do this from the file manager in my web hosting control panel.

Next, you are likely to want to edit text files such as templates, config files etc. For this I recommend NotePad++ which is also free but very effective with tabbed text-edit windows that you can move around and has syntax highlighting. I also use this editor for HTML and PHP editing.

To check out website ideas, scripts and plugins on your computer, a cool solution is XAMPP which makes it very easy to set up a web server on your computer for development purposes. This saves you needing to keep uploading files to a live site to test things.

To build web pages, you may want to use a WYSIWYG (What You See is What You Get) editor. This helps you create HTML pages in a visual environment. Several applications to consider are: XSite Pro, Dreamweaver, and NVU. For HTML only, consider HTML Kit or NotePad++.

So, hopefully, this should get you on the way to selecting your software for internet marketing tools to build websites.