Webmaster Toolkit
If you want to become (or remain) an efficient and professional webmaster, you’re going to have an arsenal of “can’t do without” webmaster tools. These tools will help you preform tasks related to image editing, FTP, HTML editing, etc. Instead of a boring preamble, let’s just get stuck in!
Here are the usual suspects in many professional webmasters’ toolkits (or at least mine!):
HTML Editors
Contrary to common belief, you don’t need a sophisticated HTML editor to streamline your coding if you’re creating static sites like this one. I have Dreamweaver 8, but guess what I use that for? It’s a glorified FTP client! I don’t use any of the design/coding features in Dreamweaver.
Instead, I use notepad++. For HTML editing it’s a step up from the TextPad I used to use, and a giant leap from the original NotePad. And it’s free.I use it all the time.
Image Editors
I know a lot of webmasters swear by Adobe Photoshop, which is fine, but I prefer Fireworks. I suppose it’s all about familiarity. I’ve been using Fireworks for years and can accomplish any image editing taskk in a matter of seconds. I admit that Photoshop has way more features and is much (much!) more powerful than Fireworks, but I don’t really need those features. If you do lots of design work, thn you may have a need for Photoshop. If however, your main focus is the written word and you use images merely to illustrate your writing, you’ll find Fireworks more than adequate.
FTP Client
I mentioned earlier that my usual FTP client is Dreamweaver. That’s installed on my desktop PC, but on my laptop I have a free FTP client called FileZilla. It does the job and it’s quite easy to use. If all you want to do is upload files to and download files from your server, you could do a lot worse than FileZilla.
Deluxe Webmaster Toolkit
If you want to really push the envelope as a webmaster, you really need to be thinking about how best to serve your visitors, and in particular, how best to make use of the search engines. Search engines provide a very useful source of free traffic, and should not be ignored.
This section is a work in progress (I might even link to a separate web page), and will be aimed at giving you the tools to maximise your website’s performance.