Bluewave Digital

Before we get started, I'm going to try to be as platform agnostic as possible. While my main platform is OS X (Leopard. And yes, I need to make that distinction), I also do a lot of my work on Linux and to a much lesser extent, Windows. As a result, my suggestions are primarily for OS X and Linux users, but aside from the text editor I will suggest, everything else is fairly platform agnostic.

Now that the disclaimer is out of the way, we can get to the meat of the issue: since the beginning of the web, all you've really needed to throw up a website is a text editor, some web space, and some way of getting the files from your computer to the web space. Of these, the only one that really should cost anything is the web space.

As the years went by and designs and websites became more complicated, the need for better tools arose, causing a plethora of authoring tools to become available, often for quite ridiculous prices. For someone on a student budget, this makes it quite impossible to "compete" with those able to purchase the tools.

That being said, the main requirements for a site have not changed, so it is still possible to throw up a good looking site for very minimal to no investment of money/

The Text Editor

Note that the following are personal preferences and are by no means the way of doing things.

The meat and potatoes of any design project will be the actual code and as such, you need to have a text editor that you are comfortable with (and doesn't do things that make you want to throw it through a window).

On OS X, I have pretty much defaulted to using Smultron, a free, open source text editor for Mac. The reason I specified Leopard in my disclaimer paragraph is that the latest version of Smultron is for Leopard only, but there are earlier versions available for earlier versions of OS X.

Smultron showing the SF State web theme

The reason I ended up using Smultron on a regular basis instead of what I was using before (Textwrangler, for the curious) is I just generally like it better. It does syntax highlighting, but it also does code completion and bracket highlighting. It has a plethora of other things to offer (code snippets, inserting hex colors from a menu, etc), but those are the primary reasons why I like it.

On Linux, I tend to gravitate towards Gedit, as it does pretty much the same things. In all honesty, if I could figure out a way to use Gedit natively on my mac (meaning, without X11), I'd totally go for it. The plugin architecture is awesome, and little things like an embedded terminal make it an ideal choice for me. That being said, I'm liking Smultron more and more...

Gedit showing a part of my unfinished podcast generator

Whenever I'm forced to use Windows, which isn't very often, I just use Notepad++. However, I'm not on Windows long enough to make an assessment.

The graphics editor

Plain and simple, GIMP. I know what most people say about this, so I will get it out of the way before hand: no, it is not Photoshop, and no, it is not meant to be Photoshop.

That being said, I have found it invaluable to me in both photo manipulation as well as simple graphic creation. It does everything I need. Best of all, it runs on Linux, Mac (now with native experimental GTK support!), and Windows (and probably anything else that supports GTK+).

GIMP with an empty project

This last version has fixed a whole bunch of small nitpicks and has put into place a more extensible framework, so we should be seeing some really cool development for it fairly soon.

I'm beginning to learn Inkscape for some vector art goodness, but I haven't played with it enough to be confident to use it for anything quite yet...though, the mushroom at http://sharemyfood.bluewavedigital.net was done in Inkscape, now that I think about it. Inkscape is also multi-platform.

If it doesn't make you hungry, then I have failed...or succeeded. I don't think I want you to eat your screen.

Putting your shiny new site online

Finally, there's the tool used to upload your site. Honestly, depending on your server any FTP client should work, but if your server supports SFTP, there are a few tools out there to help. I use Cyberduck (whose site at the time of this writing seems to be down), but if all you need is a plain FTP client, the FireFTP addon for Firefox works just dandy.

That's it for this time around. Next time I'll get into the wonders of cross platform testing...