Category: general computing

Do you know that there are free alternatives for Web design and editing? Yes, there are. The most established and capable ones are listed below:

Kompozer - WYSIWG web editor

Kompozer is a WYSIWYG web editor. WYSIWG stands for 'what you see is what you get'. Kompozer is similar in look and feel to the commercial Dreamweaver Web Editing Suite. It is an improvement of the very popular NVU free web editor. NVU web editor is plagued with many annoying bugs. Kompozer is better in the sense that it is much more usable than NVU now. NVU has the tendency to rewrite your codes which is extremely frustating. Kompozer, on the other hand, does not appear to have such habits. Do you know that this page itself is created using Kompozer? Yes it is. 

There are versions of Kompozer for Windows, Mac and Linux. Below is a screenshot of Kompozer. You can get Kompozer here.

Bluefish - Programmer's web editor

Bluefish is another good web editor. However, it is not WYSIWYG. It will require you to understand the programming codes in order for you to work with it. 

Bluefish supports many web design related markup and programming languages. It is a powerful tool in the hands of web designers who understand the coding aspect of web editing. There are versions for Windows, Mac and Linux. On the right is a screenshot of Bluefish on Ubuntu linux.  You can get Bluefish here.

So, can the free alternatives replace commercial giants such as Dreamweaver. Not quite. But for most web design projects, the free alternatives are good enough.

The web design and editing environment is not complete without image-editing and file-transfer programs. Fortunately, there are free alternatives for these two functions as well. Gimp is a very capable image editor that will be able to handle the needs of most web design graphic needs. I will not cover GIMP here as I am quite sure most are aware of its capability and existence.

FileZilla - FTP tool

For file transfer and uploading to the web server, Filezilla is a very good free alternative. I don't know about you, but I find Filezilla very useful. Perhaps, this is because I do not use the default uploading tools that comes with web editors.

The sceenshot on the right is a typical interface of Filezilla. In case, you do not know, FTP stands for File Transfer Protocol. We use FTP tools to uploads our files onto the web host's server. There are other free ftp tools around, but generally, I find Filezilla to be the most user-friendly. You can get Filezilla here.

In the nutshell, those are the essential free alternatives for web design. There are many other good support freewares for web design. It is impossible for me to cover them all. I will simply list some that I think we may need once in a blue moon:

Optional Support Tools

1. Coffee Cup Free Image slicer

Basically as the name implies, it helps in slicing images into smaller pieces. These smaller pieces are held together in a table and thus will look like a fully intack piece of image. The advantage of image slicing is that it speed up loading time as well as prevent image thief.

2. Inkscape - 2D vector editor

You can use this to make illustration-type 2D graphics for the website. This is a free alternative for 2D illustration. It is similar in function to Adobe Illustrator, Freehand or Coreldraw.

Well, that's all for the article. Happy experimenting and hope you find this article useful.