Question
There are so many useful and FREE things on the net. I have a list of things I use when building websites, but most of them are old. Sometimes I feel like there's new and better stuff that I'm missing.
Let's start a list of things to share. Two simple rules:
1. They must be used for web design.
2. They must be FREE.
Here's mine:
Buttonz and Tilez
http://www.b-zone.de/software/bt.htm
It's an oldie but goodie. I've been using it for about 5 years.
The package includes 2 applications, "Buttonz!", which creates buttons of various shapes, and "Tilez!", which renders seamless textures (backgrounds).
Buttonz! renders buttons with various bevel types and shapes from either an imported image, or using a procedural texture. Buttonz! supports the batch rendering of multiple buttons from the same template, each having a different caption - no more layered cut & paste work in your image processing software!
With Tilez! choose from 20 basic texture types, all of which can be modified to suit your needs. Textures can be combined in layers to produce more complex ones. You can even import images to include them in a texture as a layer. The end product is a "tile" which produces a seamless background for web pages.
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http://www.htmlgoodies.com/
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Web Developer Extension for Mozilla Firefox.
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Turtle, thanks for that link. I've been playing some with Firefox. I really like it so far. I'll install that and see what it looks like.
Here's another tool:
Map This: http://www.5star-shareware.com/WebDe.../map-this.html
Creates a clickable image map. Allows you to draw the areas you wish to be linked to a web URL. Draws squares, circles, or freeform shapes. (This has been around since 3.1 days, but it works just fine in Windows 2000.)
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Here's a sample page using Tilez!
http://216.92.199.248/page/playpage.html
The table background is an image made with Tilez!
The "Do It" image is just the tile with the text added in PSP. The "Click" image is the tile with a bevel and text added in PSP.
The dissolve rollover script is from dynamicdrive.com.
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Originally Posted by jayne
Map This: http://www.5star-shareware.com/WebDe.../map-this.html
Creates a clickable image map. Allows you to draw the areas you wish to be linked to a web URL. Draws squares, circles, or freeform shapes. (This has been around since 3.1 days, but it works just fine in Windows 2000.)
If you want to see an example of how this works, look at the tab menu at the top of the page. The five tabs (Portal Entrance, Discussion Forums, etc.) are all one image. Each individual tab is hyperlinked to a different page. The web designer can hardcode this in HTML or use a utility program like Map This to generate the necessary code.
You can see the area that's mapped when you click a link. It shows a box, or in this case a freeform shape, around the clickable part of the picture.
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I still use Netscape Composer quite a bit, its a WYSIWYG html editor included with Netscape Communicator. I've had good luck in the compatibility department when using it.
Netscape Composer was placed on the back burners when AOL took over Netscape, but Mozilla Org eventually picked up the pieces and began developing an upgraded open source version of Netscape, so now ther's more than one flavor of Netscape available, the AOL "Netscape", the Mozilla browser, and lastly - Firefox (formerly known as Firebird) which is supposed to be the best of the breed.
As for Netscape Composer, two upgraded versions of that have been in development... Mozilla.org has expanded the Mozilla stand-alone browser to include the Composer add-on, comparable to the old familiar COMMUNICATOR installation (which includes an email client by the way - which goes by the name "Thunderbird" today) where as NVU.com has a new stand alone Composer Module for doing web page compostion.
The NVU iteration is still in beta and I installed it recently for testing purposes, etc. It does have a commendable feature set, integrating CSS tags and what not, however it still has some issues... its stable in that nothing got toasted or anything like that, but when working with images, the image placement gets all messed up when viewing a finished page, when viewing them from the old Netscape browsers at least. Yet, from IE, Firefox and Mozilla the image placement seemed to be ok. I installed Mozilla 1.7 on another machine, including the Composer add-on, but I haven't tested to see if it has the same problem or not.
The thing that I like about these HTML editors is that they allow you to focus on the appearance and layout of your design as opposed to watching the syntax of your coding, etc. There are some differences, but if you can use a word processor, you can conjure up a pretty good webpage without touching any raw html codes.
For working up single pages, I think Netscape (Communicator) Composer 4.x is the tool of choice considering its stability. But for developing a complete web interface, the more recent versions would probably be better considerig the optional use of CSS tags. Once they get the bugs out, I'll probably recommend switching to one of them.
Nothing worse than looking at a webpage that gets all chopped up due to browser incompatibilities or because a site uses some new-fangled script that goes haywire because of the user's network settings.
There are some other Content Management Systems for advanced users that are worth looking into, but I won't recommend any particular one... In my opinion, if there's any one prequisite for choosing a CMS system, it should have a user interface such that an average PC user can design and/or update a site without any help (or at least with minimal involvement) from the IT department once the CMS system is in place.
Personally, I want to start learning FLASH... Once you get beyond the typical splash pages, Flash sites rarely fail to impress me. The content might be poor, but the presentation is usually pretty good :-)
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I won't argue the merits (or pitfalls) of wysiwyg editors. Either you hate 'em or you love 'em. I will admit that without wysiwyg, I sometimes have to pull out the calculator and count pixels to get things to fall where I want them.
I DO love Flash! Here's my current fav: http://hummer.com/bigrace/bigrace.html
For me, Flash is the place where art meets technology. A well-done flash page is amazing.
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Here's another good one...
http://www.particleadventure.org/par...ure/index.html
I visited the site a year or so ago, and they reworked it in flash... click the START button.
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Browser Sizer: http://www.applythis.com/browsersizer/
A nifty little tool that lets you see how your web pages look with different screen resolutions.