Site development resources
We’ve found these tools useful to help us design user-friendly sites, create useful content and analyze the effects of our work. Perhaps you will find them helpful, as well.
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Surfulater
Diane says: as a writer, I find this productivity tool indispensible! It’s something like a "Favorites" list on steroids, but there’s way more to it than just that. Save and categorize everything from simple links to entire articles from the web and other applications, cross reference related items and add your own notes. I’m always running across useful bits of information I know I’ll be able to use in a future article, technical tips and interesting resources, and this is the best way I’ve found for storing them all — and more importantly, being able to retrieve them in an organized and useful way later on. There’s a free trial — but I warn you, once you try this tool out, you may not be able to live without it… -
Dreamweaver
Roseann says: excellent Web site design and coding software for those who prefer a WYSIWYG interface, with an integrated code view for those who need to see the "guts" of the HTML. Use it with Contribute 3to provide your web design clients with a full-featured Content Management System (CMS). Adobe (formerly Macromedia) products are the industry standard, and with good reason, in my opinion.
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PhotoImpact 11
Need to create graphics for the Web? Diane says: PhotoImpact is my tool of choice for Web graphics and desktop publishing projects. It’s much more economical than PhotoShop, and I think it has an easier interface to learn and use. Still, it gives you most of the same capabilities (frankly, the main weakness I’ve seen is in the handling of CMYK color, but if you aren’t creating graphics to send out to a printing service, you probably won’t use CMYK format anyway!). Very powerful, yet reasonably-priced and easy to use; also works with most PhotoShop plug-ins. -
pairNetworks
Once you’ve got great content and a great design, you’ll need somewhere to host your site. We host almost all of our sites and our client sites with pairNetworks and recommend them wholeheartedly to all our associates. We’ve found we get a lot of value for our money with pairNetworks, and their customer service and support is responsive and knowledgeable.