by John Stephen Jones

Created on: January 18, 2007   Last Updated: March 31, 2007

From a software perspective, you should have at least the following available:

(1)A good text editor
HTML kit, notepad or notepad++ are very good editors and they are free. These are excellent tools for producing (X)HTML pages. Also CSS Toplite is fantastic for hand coding your CSS, this can also be done in notepad. If you have some cash to part with, Dreamweaver is the industry standard for hand coding as it has a real time design view so you can see what you are coding on the fly. But there is absolutely nothing wrong with using a basic editor like notepad.

If you are developing more advanced websites which include technologies such as Javascript.Then you can still use notepad or HTML kit to hand code Javascript. Dreamweaver has support for server side scripting such as ASP.net,PhP,and Coldfusion. It also works hand in hand with Flash where you can import swf (Flash files) directly into your Dreamweaver site.

(2)A good image editor.
There are plenty to choose from. GIMP is a good free image editor, but if you have a little cash to spare, Photoshop elements is a very good low cost alternative.
Personally, I use Macromedia (Adobe) Fireworks. Its a little expensive but worth every penny.

(3)Web developers toolbar (Firefox extension)
This is a great little extension for the firefox web browser. Its an application that sits in your toolbar enabling you to check everything on your site from image file size, to highlighting elements, viewing css and html source code,and,most importantly a function that enables you to validate your css/html mark up code with the W3C's validation service.

(4)A good FTP client. The client built into Dreamweaver is very handy and the current version lets you carry on working as your files upload to the server.
Smart FTP client is also very good and it is a free open source tool available for you to download.

(5)Multiple Browsers
This is very important as different browsers will parse your code in their own little ways. You should test your code on the most standard compliant browsers first. I recommend you test on Mozilla Firefox or if you are using a Mac, try it on Safari (You can get Firefox on a Mac as well). Then you should test on the less standard compliant browsers such as IE6 and IE7 (even though IE7 is a little more compliant.) The major problems you may encounter are on older browsers such as IE5 which sometimes do not support certain levels of CSS. If this happens then you should make sure that your code degrades gracefully. This means that your web pages should be readable without any styling ie:no images and no css styles.

(6)Once you get your design brief, I find its always a good idea to do mock ups in Fireworks or Photoshop. This way you can show designs to your client without wasting expensive time coding something they may not be 100% happy with. If they love the mock up then it makes life easier as you know then that what you are coding the design it's what the client is happy with.

(7)Lots of pen and paper

(8)Plenty of strong coffee! Happy coding!

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