Day 2: webdesign tools and software I can’t live without
There’s quite a lot of tools and software I use and have used over the passed years. Some of those I simply can’t live without. Let’s take a look at them. I’m interested to hear if you use them too and if you maybe know some good additions and alternatives.
Let’s make clear that I’m working on a Windows (no, not vista) machine. There’s a big change I’ll be switching to Mac in the near future. We allready bought an iMac which my beloved colleague Anne is the proud owner of. The next one will become mine 
There’s not a lot that can stop me from switching to Mac, the only thing is that a need a real good php editor because I’m pretty addicted to Zend Studio! So if you know a decent php editor for the Mac, please let me know!
Head over to the tools now. I’ll describe the most important ones I really cannot miss. It won’t be that much as you expect I guess.
Zend Development Environment
I’ve been using Zend for a long time now. It’s by far the best editor I have ever worked with. I use it for php coding and writing html / css.
Zend has a lot of options like debugging, a build in function library and is very easy to use. You can create a project for each website you’re working on which makes it easy to quickly browse and open the right files.
WS_FTP 95
Don’t laugh! I know, this was build in the Middle Ages! This is the very first FTP software I ever used and I still use it. A couple of months ago I switched to smartFTP which is a great tool. BUT, some trojan came into my pc, stole the ftp passwords from the three sites I added to smartFTP and uploaded infected files to the server. Took me quite some time to repair it and I immediately switched back to WS_FTP.
Trojans somehow can’t get access to stored passwords in WS_FTP which is a great benefit!
Notetab Light
Can’t remember when, how and where I got this… This simple text editor I use to create and edit .htaccess files and robots.txt.
Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop
What shall I say. I believe Illustrator and Photoshop are a great combination for anyone who designs websites or any other kind of material.
In short words I use Photoshop to crop and resize images and to add effects to it.
For all the other work like the website lay-out and logo’s I use Illustrator. I’m a really big fan of it!
Do you use Photoshop or Illustrator when designing websites?
Adobe Flash
I’m not a big fan of it, but I can work with it. I used to build websites completely in Flash but don’t do that anymore. When animations are needed, Flash is a great tool.
Advanced JPEG Compressor
Simple tool to compress JPEG files. I use this tool when large photos are used in a design, like full screen backgrounds.
phpMyAdmin
This webbased Mysql administration tool I use to create and manage my databases. Absolutely love it!
Well I think that’s about it. These are the tools I really can’t miss when developing a website.
So which are your favorite tools? Let us know!
See you tomorrow!
Thomas
Great list. I used to rely on Adobe Fireworks, Illustrator, Photoshop, and Dreamweaver. That was until I found Xara Xtreme 5 and gave it a fair chance. It consolidated Illustrator and Fireworks while being up to 10 times faster than Illustrator. Give the demo a try. Xara Xtreme Design Software
Did you try navicat for managing the database? its perfect since you can copy files from one db to anthores, and do it all local
I’ve heard about that before (someone once pointed me at it
) but never really tried it. But you’re right, I should try that!
I downloaded Mysql Workbench 5.1 this week btw. That’s a nice tool for designing the database. But I guess navicat can do that too? I mean, visually drawing the tables and connecting them and stuff.