Best Free Website Tools

The Best Free Website Tools section of Iron Spider is dedicated to listing the best no-cost software and online tools available to webmasters to build and upload websites and then evaluate the results. The reviews you'll find in this section are not just copy-and-pasted from promotional blurbs but rather are based on my first hand experience. That is, I've extensively tested all the software and online tools I feature here and many of them are part of my personal web design tackle box.

More particularly, this includes:

• The best free text editors
• The best free graphics editors
• The best free website analysis tools

The following provides an introductory paragraph and a link to each page in this section:

Best Free Text Editors

Text editors come in many shapes and sizes but, more importantly, it should be understood that this is really an umbrella term for various kinds of editors which perform various tasks appealing to webmasters of varying skill levels. And there appears to be some confusion about what exactly does what.

This page hence starts off with defining clearly what exactly an HTML editor is (or should be). On the other hand, we have visual web editors or WYSIWYG editors which specialize in something else.

I feel it's important to make the distinction because you might end up with the wrong program and ultimately head off in the wrong direction in your career as a web designer.

Following these definitions, I list what I think to be the best free text editors available out there on the net...

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Best Free Graphics Editors

If you want to put images on your web pages (and believe me, you do), you're going to need a graphics editor that can modify those images to, at the very least, crop them, resize them and compress them to reduce their file sizes to make them fast loading on your website. To do all this and more, you're going to need a decent graphics editor.

The best and most well known graphics editor out there is, of course, the notorious Photoshop but this is pretty high end. If you're in school, you can get up to 80% off with Adobe CS5.5 Student and Teacher Editions. If not and/or you have no experience with graphics editors, you may want to start with something along the lines of, well, free to get your feet wet and see exactly what your image or photo editing needs are.

To this end, this page lists the best free graphics editors to be found out there...

Free Website Analysis Tools

After your website is complete and you've gone live with it by uploading it to a web host (see my webhosting tutorials if you don't know how to do this), you're going to want to keep tabs on that baby by availing yourself of the best free website analysis tools you can lay your hands on.

With these online tools, you can monitor the number of daily visitors to your site (commonly known as traffic), see how fast your website loads, check for bad HTML, make sure your website is up and running 24/7/365 (and if it isn't, switch to Hostgator, the best web host on the net) and more...

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