Web Developer / Designer Toolkit

I sat here thinking in how I can bore you today, so I suddenly thought of what tools I use everyday for web design and development, and I thought anyone aspiring to make the leap to web design might need to know what they practically need. The tools are generally expensive, but will last you a good few years, but hopefully it’s a worthy investment.

So lets see, what do you need?

Well you really do need yourself a copy of Dreamweaver 8 or Dreamweaver CS2, or Dreamweaver CS3 - If I’m honest, which I try to be when I’m not lying to you. There isn’t a huge amount of different between these 3 versions. They hardly improved it all. Dreamweaver 8 will work adequatley well, though it can crash frequently, so be sure to save…  The benefits of dreamweaver is that you can turn your templates into code pretty quick with this tool. It’s got good CSS knowledge, and a good all round development environment.

So I’ll list what it is good for:

1. Good for designing your templates, though isn’t essential, speeds you up.
2. Good for it’s understanding of CSS, CSS code is wicked fast to sort.
3. Organising your sites, though beware, Dreamweaver 8 can crash a lot, and loose these, if you organise your sites yourself better, then do so.
4. Lots of time savers are in here.

What Dreamweaver is bad for :

1. Price, too expensive, but adobe have the monopoly on web dev / design
2. Crap for PHP, its really naff.
3. Crashing in earlier than CS2 versions, but its infrequent, just save often.
4. Not developing this further over 3 versions and huge prices.

Photoshop is the next one, it’s a very handy tool and is certainly used daily. Without this tool, you may as well not bother doing any design. You can create anything you need, there is no decent equivilents, even if you paid for one. Nothing simply compares. It is pricey, the latest version you can afford is definatley suggested.

Whats good?

1. Easy to use
2. Countless features and time saving shortcuts
3. Like we only use something like 10% of our brain, compare that to photoshop.
4. Optimize your graphics for web or for print
5. Industry standard now for design.

Whats Bad?

1. The price, though I guess for the best of the best, you can hardly complain
2. Adobe’s linux easter egg in photoshop (pop at linux)
3. Nothing else compares to it.
4. You actually need this tool to do the job.

Ok next up is internet browsers, you need to have all of them, I won’t make this a biggy, but if you can’t be bothered to install them you certainly need IE6, IE7 & Firefox. But here is the full list of what I have installed.

What you need really:

1. IE6 - This is still widely used, and lots of people are forgetting this.
2. IE7 - Hard to get both on one machine, sometimes you need 2 PC’s
3. Firefox 2 - More popular than marmite.
4. Safari - Less popular than marmite
5. Chrome - Is marmite

What’s bad about all the browsers:

1. There are too many browsers and it makes our life awkward
2. They look at standards, and then see how many different ways they can ignore them
3. Google now has a browser
4. Tabs, everyone else loves them but me, irritating, bring back IE6!
5. Firefox Hog’s Memory
6. Coutnless other things here…

What’s Good about upcoming / released browsers:

1. IE8 and browser targeting - YAY! / Uncertainty
2. Firefox 3 is awful
3. Most people hate chrome
4. Free

A quick note about mobile web browsers, mobiles are now getting more and more into zooming using ordinary browsers like Safari on the Iphone, this is good news for us, because it means you wont have to design specifically for mobiles in the future. YAY.

PHP Designer 2008 is a must for PHP web devleoperes, just go buy it now, go, leave this website, go on, get it.

What’s good?

1. Too many things to list, and I’m lazy
2. PHP manual built in, handy for offline development
3. code beautifier
4. cheap
5. loads of other reasons here

Whats bad?

1. Can’t interact with Databases so easily, but not a biggy, nothing else though.

WAMP is next up, without wamp, we’d still be resinstalling our copies of mysql, php & apache over and over on windows until it decided to work properly. But thanks to wamp we can set up our offline testing servers with ease. A big thank you here to WAMP developers. There are also versions for MAC & Linux of course.

Whats Good?

1. Test offline with PHP, mysql using apache web server
2. It’s all opensource stuff your working with.
3. Easy to install
4. Can put it online as your own pc being a web server, to show other people stuff
5. Use PHPMYADMIN with your MYSQL (installed with wamp)
6. Free

Whats bad?

1.  On windows version, you can’t set folder permissions, but thats cause its windows, not linux, so its not WAMP’s fault, but I had to put it.
2. Not all PHP functions work properly.

PHPMYADMIN is a definate must, just get it on, it’ll be clear why you need this for web development. It’ll save you 99% time on sql code.

Ok thats it really, few other bits and pieces I use, but thats the lot.

Just be warned not to buy older used software from places like ebay because of licensing and illegal copies you might get, just be careful.

Thanks

Wuup Team

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• 14 October, 2008 -- PHP Web Applications Design Process
• 5 January, 2009 -- New Wuup Template Design
• 18 December, 2008 -- Psychological Design - Have a go!
• 16 December, 2008 -- Java Basics: Programming & developement Lesson 1
• 8 December, 2008 -- Website Review: Alpha Mag.co.uk