Basic recommended tools for website design and for uploading files onto a server, photo manipulation and graphic design. Although wordpress comes as a ready to use out of the box system customising the layout and design and adding  graphics will make the wordpress website stand out from the crowd and become a site that is easy to remember with a strong branding even if it is just a personal website/blog.

All the tools featured below are used by us here at foxdesign.org for design, template modification and more. All are free to download. Check the associated site for the latest update for that particular software.

The Gimp:   Free GNU Photo Editing application that is as pwerful as the more famous but commercial and incredibly expensive Adobe Photoshop. Comes in various versions so if you are using an older computer then there are older versions that are designed to run on older machines. Takes a while to get used to the user interface but once mastered this is one of the best photo editing software’sout there at present that is free and it’s been around for a long time. Recent developments have seen a new interface added to make The Gimp similar in appearance and to use as Adobe Photoshop. Worth a look. Recommended in it’s original form.

Filezilla. Used by the vast majority of webmasters this has remained the best free way of transferring files (FTP) onto a server and is best for transferring very large files and complete websites from one server to another and keeps a tab of any dropped files during the process. Also is handy for changing the properties of files on the server from Read or Write capability via CHMOD plus many other functions which may or may not be available on lesser ftp software.

Kompozer:  There are hundreds of html editors out there that do the same job of creating HTML code and also creating CSS files and some may do it better but this is one we have stuck with over the years and is described as a WYSIWIG editor (What You See is What You Get) and can be used just like MS Word or similar and this program will generate the appropriate code. Used to be called NVU. Good for beginners and experts alike, HTML is still very much alive when it comes to coding and this editor is a good way to learn that code. A good alternative to the professional expensive but very good Dreamweaver. Downside is it is a memory hog and 1gb minimum is recommended which most modern machines have at least as a bare minimum.

Note Pad:  This has been included as surprisingly it is one of the most used programs on our computer. Handy for source coding editing and doesn’t add extra code unnecessary code like say MS Word and can perform a multitude of tasks such as creating robots.txt files, read php files and edit them and more. It’s free and comes as standard with Windows. There is a also notepad++ with advanced features that also works with windows.

Pingdom: Used extensively to test the loading time and loading structure of a website and it’s constituent elements, Pingdom is an online resource for webmasters and website designers to test various designs and the final result to ensure that page load times and any errors or bottlenecks are corrected to ensure smooth website loading and to reduce server strain.. Essential and Free!

Scrub The Web.  Essentially a search engine but does have  free online applications that enables the production of meta tags and then the testing of those meta tags to ensure maximum visibility and search engine friendly title, description and keywords.

WordPress.org  The essential resource for all wordpress plugins, widgets and themes and its free.

Dynamic Drive: This is a classic developers resource that features dhtml, javacsript and css scripts to create cool website extras such as Slideshows
Effects, Galleries and Viewers CSS Library, Dynamic Content, Scrollers and a FavIcon Generator. For the vast majority of wordpress users this is not essential as most of these things can be achieved via widgets and plugins but for web developers it does have some good coding to enhance and personalise a wordpress blog/website but does require some coding experience where to actually place the code.