Web Publishing Software
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Other Utilities
Alongside the basic tools you use to create your pages, there are other tools that you may find useful, though you may find that some of these are actually included in your Web authoring software, particularly if it's a commercial package.
Graphics editors
Even if you aren't intending to create your own images for your Web pages, you will need a basic graphics editor in order to
- convert an image to the required format
- crop or scale the image
If you want to do more advanced image manipulation, you will need a more sophisticated graphics program.
Colour Pickers
If you are using an editor, then, because of the way colours are specified in HTML - see Using Colour - it's useful to have a tool which tells you the markup required to achieve a particular colour or set of colours. You should find that WYSIWYG Web authoring tools have this sort of facility built in.
Page checkers
It is very useful, especially, when you first start designing Web pages, to have some way of checking them for errors. This is especially true if you are creating pages with an editor rather than a word-processor or a Web authoring package (which will normally not allow pages to be created with errors).
You can either use a validator installed on your own computer [1] or use an on-line validator such as the W3C MarkUp Validation Service.
Validate this page with the W3C Validator.
Link Checkers
It is also useful to have a tool that will check that your links are correct. There are two reasons for this:
- When designing a site, it is useful to be able to check the links between your pages
- If you have links from your site to other Web pages elsewhere, you need to check periodically that these links are still valid.
For the first purpose, it is best to have software that will do this on your own computer so that you can correct links before you upload pages to the server, and Web authoring software increasingly does this. Software that does not actually check links may well allow you to create internal links via drag and drop or via a file menu, which guarantees that a link points to the correct file.
For checking external links you will need to use a proper link checker.[2]
[1] TUCOWS has validators for Windows and Macintosh.
[1] TUCOWS has links checkers on the same pages as the validators. I personally use Xenu.