Why pay for Dreamweaver or Microsoft Expression when there are some great free products out there to to get web page up and going in very little time?
In this article I’ll be suggesting some of the very best tools for building web pages and blogs, editing HTML, and even a few programs to upload your web pages and files. The good news is that most of these tools are are available at no or little cost so you don’t have to pay a lot of money to get started.
The first thing you’ll want to do is to design your web page.
Designing web pages isn’t easy, be sure and refer to my previous article on “5 Website Mistakes Business Owners are Making ” before you start designing your pages.
There are many programs available to help you build your web page. I have used Microsoft Frontpage for years. When the program was replaced by Microsoft Expression, I even made the switch over to it. I did this only because I didn’t want to take the time to learn a new program. I know that Adobe (formerly Macromedia) Dreamweaver is an very good option but the learning curve is just to big for me.
There has to be a better and less expensive option for designing a web page. After doing some research I found these products. Maybe one of them will appeal to your particular skill level.
Great programs to build a web page in no time
My Free Website Builder
My Free website builder by Ewen Chia- The king of affiliate marketing. This is a very easy what you see is what you get program.
Blinkweb
Blinkweb- This service is great for web marketing . Everything’s all laid out and ready for you to customize. The tutorials are great fro beginners. The owners have been around for a long time and are trusted in internet marketing. The service is not totally free but they have some attractive offers such as $1 for the first month and more thereafter to cover bandwith charges.
Bluevoda
I also found another program called BlueVoda that gives away a Free Website Builder . BlueVoda has some free software with an interface that is almost like microsoft word.The free website builder will do a lot, however to publish your site you must use their webhost which is called VodaHost. Hosting starts at $7.95 a month.
Tools For Building Blogs
If you really want a quality website that will do great with the search engines then there’s really no need to build a traditional website. I recommend building your web page using a blog format.
Wordpress or Blogger? You can obtain a free blog using either wordpress or blogger.
I recommend using wordpress instead of blogger although blogger is very user friendly.
There are a lot of people, including myself, that now use Wordpress for all their websites, blogs and nonblogs alike. In other words you can build a regular CMS (Content Mangement System) website using Wordpress.
If you use the totally free wordpress service you will be able to switch over to your own host one day and will already be familiar with the program.
For Web Hosting I reccomend Bluehost since they already have a fantastico icon with an easy link to install wordpress.
Artiseer
A fairly new blog design/website design tool is called Artisteer. This Web design automation product instantly creates fantastic looking, unique Website templates and Blog themes using wordpress. I found this tool very easy to use and the price is affordable.
BlogI360
BlogI360- This service will help you with a blog for $1 for the first month. I really like the format of the blog. They already have add ins to help you promote your site with the search engines. After the first month the price goes up because they also provide you with a domain name and web hosting on their server.
Blinkweb
Blinkweb- I’ve already mentioned this product, however, In addition to building traditional websites you can also build a web marketing blog using this program. You can try it out for free.
HTML Webpages
Of course there’s always the option of building your own webpage from scratch. This is as simple as opening up notepad and placing a code something like this in it:
<head>
<title></title>
</head>
<body>
</body>
</html>
You’ll want to make sure you save it with an html extension (ex: page.html). So if you’re up for it, why not build you own webpage using HTML? It’s a great learning experience and it’s very inexpensive.
Here are some of my favorites HTML editors:
Notetab Lite
Notetab lite- lets you format text to your heart’s content; does system-wide searches, and multi-line global replacements. It even corrects your spelling mistakes.
Notetab Plus
Notepad+Plus- This source code editor is a replacement for Notepad and it supports several languages.I learned about this program from Fred Black at www.pqInternet.com.
Fred has an excellent course on web site creation and HTML that he gives away for free on his site.
NVU and Kompozer
NVU- A complete web authoring system which gives frontpage (Now Microsoft Expression) and Dreamweaver some very good completion.
KompoZer is a newer version of NVU however many users still prefer the NVU interface. KompoZer is based on Gecko, the layout engine inside Mozilla; it’s a super-fast, very reliable, standards conformant engine maintained on a daily basis by a wide community of developers.It is one of the most extensible editing tools ever.
Those who are familiar with the DreamWeaver and the Microsfot Expression interface will feel right at home with KompoZer as it includes WYSIWYG (What you see is what you get)editing of pages, Integrated file management via FTP, plus many other features.
CoffeeCup HTML Editor
CoffeCup Html Editor- Here lately I have been using this full HTML editor since it provides a lot of shortcuts and also aids me in learning HTML.
Coffee cup has a great web page with so many products that you wont know what to choose from. Download CoffeeCup HTML Editor - Click Here.
Here’s the good news. CoffeeCup also has a totally free html editor with a free ftp program included.Download The Free Web Design Software Here
The Coffeecup software was recommended to me by Shelly Lowery at Web Design Mastery. Shelly’s course offers hundreds of free copy and paste HTML codes to help design professional websites. When you sign up on the form provided she gives you a very good HTML guide in hopes that you will purchase the full product. I purchased her Web Design Mastery Guide and refer to it constantly.
I also found one more interesting little freebie on the Coffecup site. Coffeecup also has a website optimization service called FireFactor. I will be the first to tell you that you don’t have to pay to submit your site to search engines but the free report was nice. Here’s the form to get the report:
These Free SEO tools are also available on their site:
Uploading Your Finished Webpage to the Web
Once you have designed your webpage you will want to upload it to the web. Many of the programs I have mentioned in this article have their own capabilities for uploading to the web, however it is very useful to know of a few products to upload files and make minor changes to your webpages.
Free Tools To Upload Your Web Pages
There are so many free FTP ( File Transfer Protocol) solutions available to upload your files and web pages that I couldn’t possibly name them all. Wikipedia has a chart comparing all the FTP clients.
I am using 2 different programs:
Filezilla
Filezilla - Besides bing easy to use, FileZilla features include the ability to run on Windows, Linux, or Mac. The program is available in many language and it supports resume and transfer of large 4 GB files. One of my favorite features is the ability to use the drag and drop support. I have also set up the remote file editing using notepad as the default editor.
FireFTP
Since this program integrates with my firefox browser it is one of my favorites, especially since it has all the features I previously mentioned for firezilla.
My Picks
So what are my preferred programs?
Here they are:
Website Building and Design
Although I like both blinkweb and Artiseer for ease of use, they’re not free. My choice for building a website would definitely be through wordpresss. As I said, Wordpress is not just for blogs. You can actually design a website through wordpress. In my opinion, this is where all website designs are heading. I even have a website design business in which I only design web pages using my own hosting and wordpress formats.
So to make it easy, head over to wordpress.com to get your free account and get started with your own webpage today.
HTML editors:
My choice for a Free HTML editor would be Kompozer, however a good possibility would be to pay a little more and use the Coffeecup HTML editor.
Free FTP Client Tools
I constantly use both Filezilla FTP and Fireftp. They are both my top picks.
Publish Your Comments
I hope this article aids you in finding the best software to suit your needs. Choose the free stuff for now and then move on to paid hosting and programs once you feel comfortable with your progress.
If you find something better than the tools I’ve listed, I welcome your comments. I am open to suggestions.
To Real Business Success With Life Purpose,
Greg
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Thanks for the info,
Matt
-ThatsBlog.com
I was a sceptical because of the price, but boy did they deliver for about
$200 they did the most amazing work for me. I just wanted to pass that along to
you guys.
you can check them out at: http://www.leadsware.com/renovastar/index.html