Discover the top design and dev apps TODAY!
Our top 50 in no particular order, includes the likes of WordPress and Drupal, as well as some you may have never thought of such as OpenProj and Movable Type. Every thing you need to design and develop your website from small, personal or large websites, Will be listed below. Plus that the fact they are all free.
Below we have categorised the tools Audio, Graphics, CSS & Scripting, Testing, Workflow, CMS, FTP, Stats, Video and Flash
Audio
Whether you’re recording voiceovers or editing music, this open source, cross-platform audio editor is a gem – especially if you also install the LAME MP3 encoder, or the FFmpeg library.
Graphics
ColorZilla adds a selection of useful tools to the firefox status bar, enabling you to identify pixel colours, create your own palettes and copy colour codes to other apps. You also get a CSS gradient generator and an analyser that finds the CSS rules responsible for a page’s colours.
Part design app and part design blog, Colourlovers offers a wealth of colour palettes and patterns to help inspire you – and ther are also browser-based tools that can use design and/or share your own creations. Colour codes are provided in both hex and RGB.
A quick and easy way to tweak images for the web, this HTML-powered image editor enables you to upload an image and then sharpen, crop resize or apply special effects to it. The editor can be embedded in your own site too, and can specify which tool you want your users to have.
With copies of Creative Suite costing an arm and a leg these days, free Photoshop-style programs are increasingly attractive. We particulary like GIMPshop, which takes the open source image editor GIMP and adds an Adobe-style interface on top to make the package friendlier to Photoshop users.
Inkscape is an open source vector illustration program based around the SVG format, and it’s a very good one – but SVG isn’t the only thing it can do. You can export multiple objects as PNG’s, which means inkscape isn’t bad tool for mocking up layouts and creating interface elements. It’s also a basic but good alternative to programs such as Illustrator and CorelDraw.
Another Free online tool from Adobe, Kuler is intergrated into Creative Suite, is available as a stand-alone service in your browser and can be accessed via free Adobe AIR app too. It’s a colour scheme showcase that enables you to create new scheme from experimentation or from images you select.
We can’t better Layerstyles own blurb “just like your favourite graphics editor but in your browser. And it creates CSS.” The Photoshop-style dialog box makes it easy to create and preview shadows and borders, and the CSS Code button – yes! – shows the resulting CSS code.
Paint.net is a powerful image editor for Windows that’s more user-friendly than GIMP. It’s particularly useful for photo editing, but the included drawings tools and support for multiple layers means it’s a decent illustration package too.
Splashup is an image editor that supports layers, layer effects and layer opacity, includes images effects such as sharpening and blurring, and can easily crop and resize online images. In the right hands it’s really rather impressive.
If you’re considering spending money on an image editor, you should try GIMP first. The UI on non-Linux versions isn’t brilliant, but that’s a minor niggle when you’re getting such an accomplished editing program without spending a penny.
CSS & Scripting
This Integrated Development Environment (IDE) does a decent job of being all things to all people: it’s happy to help you author in HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP and Ruby and it lets you know which browsers will balk at your bright ideas.
Bluefish is a code editor geared towards dynamic site building. it’s multiplatform, supports HTML, XHTML, CSS, JavaScript, CSS, SQL, Python, Ruby and many more, can recover your code in the event of a crash and offers unlimited undo/redo.
A simple “Choose Something” drop-down takes you to an effective way of experimenting with and generating the code for key CSS features such as box radiuses, outlines and gradients. It’s easy to use and is a delight to look at, too.
CSSed is a capable and extendable CSS editor for Linux with features including syntax highlighting, syntax validation, auto-completion and some support for other languages.
Eclipse started life as an integrated development environment for java programming, but it’s become something much bigger: it provides a platform, runtime and frameworks for developing applications in languages including JavaScript, C++ and others.
Many developers cut their teeth on HTML-Kit, a fast, free and flexible HTML/CSS editor that is easily expandable via plug-ins. The free version will no longer be developed, but there’s enough there to keep you occupied for years.
JSLint takes your JavaScript code, scans it for potential problems and tells you what it finds. As creator Douglas Crockford explains: “It doesn’t prove that your program is correct. It just provides another set of eyes to help spot problems.
Komodo Edit is a spin-off from the (paid) Komodo IDE, and it’s a cross-platform code editor for PHP, Python, Ruby, JavaScript, Tcl, XML, HTML5 and CSS3. It offers local remote file browsing, syntax checking, autocomplete and code tips and a Firefox-style extension mechanism.
Kompozer is a Gecko-based HTML designer for “non-technical computer users” with integrated FTP and CSS editing, HTML validation and a tabbed interface. It’s getting on a bit but it’s still a useful tool for beginners.
NetBeans is based around a dynamic code editor that supports Java, C++, XML, HTML, PHP, Groovy, Javadoc, JavaScript and JSP with live parsing, code completion and a customisable user interface. It’s particularly strong on the Java front.
Notepad++ is as fast and uncluttered as windows Notepad but supports more web languages. It can find and replace across multiple documents, offers autocompletion and syntax highlighting for some 52 languages, and it’s expandable via plug-ins.
Notepad2 was written to help with PHP editing and now supports a wide range of languages. The emphasis is on simplicity and speed, making Notepad2 ideal for anyone who finds Notepad++ a bit too busy.
Another lightweight code editor for Windows, PSPad offers integrated FTP, code templates, syntax highlighting and an integrated TidyHTML library for formatting and checking HTML code. It can work with multiple documents at once save sessions for future use, which is handy, and it includes a copy of the TopStyle Lite CSS editor.
Designed for working with any XML-derived language, Quanta Plus offers WYSIWYG web design and a code editor with tag completion, PHP debugging and speedy performance – and where other such tools expect to run on Windows or OS X, Quanta Plus is for Linux.
The underlying engine for SeaMonkey is the same one powering FireFox, and SeaMonkey’s Composer makes it easy to create HTML pages using its WYSIWYG interface. It’s not one for power users but it’s fine for simple building.
TextWrangler offers a range of features including a powerful search and eplace across multiple documents, remote file editing on FTP and SFTP server and multiple clipboards.
www.barebones.com/products/textwrangler
If you’re looking for a quick and easy way to generate CSS grid layouts for websites, look no further netProtozo’s Grid Generator asks how many columns you’d like, how wide they should be and what margins you’d prefer, and generates the appropriate grid, code and PNG image for you to use.
Testing
This Adobe CS Live service is free untill at least April 2012, and it’s available within Dreamweaver, as a Firebug Firefox add-on or in-browser for safari and IE users. It provides cross-browser testing and makes it easy to spot layout differences and other browser-specific annoyances.
Firebug describes itself as “the most popular and powerful web development tool”, and there’s substance to the claim.
The Firefox Web Developer Toolbar is a long-standing .net favourite, and there’s now a very pretty version for Chrome too. Both versions offer a range of tools including CSS inspection and editing, HTML, CSS and Feed validation and page analysis.
Workflow
Cage promises and end to “mundane collaboration processes” by eliminating email tennis, “marathon client meeting and folders full of mockups”. To get feedback on a design it’s just a matter of uploading it and sharing the URL
Available for Windows OS X and Linux, Dia is a simple and effective tool for drawing structured diagrams such as flow charts that’s effectively an open source equivalent to Visio. Its scriptable via Python and if the include shapes don’t suit your needs you can add your own via SVG and XML
Google Docs is an excellent tool that you can use for diagramming websites, scribbling simple ideas and getting feedback from colleagues and other interested parties, and it works on tablets as well as PC’s.
Redmine is a skinnable web-based project management system with support for multiple projects, role-based access control, integrated Gantt charts and calendars, time tracking and file management.
Tortoise SVN puts a friendly Windows interface on top of the very powerful subversion file versioning system. It’s not tied to a specific IDE so you can use it with whatever development tools you prefer.
CMS
This open source CMS is happy with everthing from a personal blog to a sprawling corporate site. One of the things that makes Drupal special is its distributions, which enable you to download the basic features for specific kinds of sites – ecommerce sites, for example, or community sites.
This open source CMS calls itself “the secure CMS” and supports multi-author websites and a selection of plug-ins that can to add new features such as image galleries, social networking and so on.
Joomla combines ease of use with plenty of advance features and expandability. It’s simple enough for clients to update their sites with minimal training, but powerful enough to handle critical corporate applications.
Version 5 of the venerable CMS offers multi-site publishing from a single installation, a new user dashboard for managing posts and sites and WordPress-style theme support. It’s particularly good for community-based sites.
Textpattern is an easy-to-use CMS that creates compliant code and SEO-friendly URLs and has been designed from the outset as a CMS that designers can use to make their content “beautiful in a professional, standards compliant manner.
The big daddy of self-hosted blogging platforms can be found powering everything from on-person blogs to university websites. It owes it success to just three things, It’s a doddle to use, It’s almost infinitely expandable, and its very easy to create and/or modify a theme to make it your own.
FTP
This open source FTP software is famed for its reliability, and with support for FTP, FTPS and SFTP it can connect to pretty much anything. The site manager makes it easy to synchronise between local and remote copies, and the recently added IPv6 support should keep it current for the foreseeable future.
FireFTP is supprisingly powerful in-browser FTP client for Firefox that works with FTP and SFTP servers. FireFTP offers a decent selection of features including directory comparison and synchronisation, file compression, search filtering, automatic reconnection and resuming of broken transfers and support for IPv6.
Stats
From tracking the effectiveness of ad campaigns and working out which pages send visitors fleeing to discovering search criteria bring people to your pages, Google Analytics does a superb job of telling site owners which bits of their site need attention.
Recently updated to include data from Google’s +1 service, the Webmaster tools suite enables you to see which keywords and search criteria are bringing in visitors, who’s linking to what on your website and whether any bits of your code are causing potential problems with your search rankings.
Video
Converting video from on format to another can be an enormous pain in the backside, but Handbrake makes it considerably less irriating. The multiplatform transcoder can read unencrypted DVDs and most other media formats, exporting in web-friendly H.264 or Ogg Theora and enabling you to save your settings for future re-use.
Flash
The Free Powerbullet application for Windows offers simple Flash presentation creation in a wizard-driven, word processing-style interface, and while the result won’t trouble ActionScript ninjas or Flash gurus it does a decent enough job.
Is you don’t want to ignore devices that can’t support Flash, Google can help. Swiffy takes an SWF file and converts it to HTML5. It supports much of Flash 5, but Google admits. “don’t expect to convert Flash games yet.
Originally intended as an alternative to Flash, AJAX animator has evolved into a cross-platform animation tool that handles animated GIFs and SVG’s as well as SWFs.