We all like free. It may be the best four letter word in the English language. But doesn’t free mean crippled when it comes to software? Not necessarily. It’s perfectly possible to use free tools, beginning-to-end, to create a website. The only limit on the quality will be your skills.

The Apple Way

With the advent of iWeb, Apple has made a bid to be a player in the Mac web design world. I’m not a big fan of the version 1 iWeb but it is simple and does allow a complete novice to put up attractive web pages. Add in iPhoto of image management and TextEdit for your web copy and you have an almost complete web publishing system. You’ll only have to get yourself an FTP program to get your site to its home on the web server to be an almost instant webmaster. If you want multimedia, throw in GarageBand and iMovie, and iTunes and you have a powerful audio/visual studio that will integrate with iWeb.

Beyond iWorld

While Apple’s iApps will get you started, the sites created by iWeb have some serious accessibility issues. And iWeb while gives you an attractive set of templates, your choices are limited. If you want more control of your web site design, you’ll have to go beyond Apple’s cookie cutter approach.

Editors

What you see is what you get

You’re still covered when it comes to freebie web tools, though. NVU has a competent WYSIWYG web page editor that’s related to the built in editor in the Mozilla Web Suite. Either can help you make web pages without your knowing a line of HTML code.

HTML/Text Editors

Still, for greatest control of you web design experience you may want to get down and dirty with HTML and there are several choices of quality tools.

[TextWrangler](http://www.barebones.com/products/textwrangler/index.shtml) and [Smultron](http://smultron.sourceforge.net/) are both good text editors that offer extensive search and replace functionality as well as syntax highlighting, which simply means that the different parts of your code are displayed in different colors. That is an immense help when writing web pages.

For a dedicated HTML editor, you could do a lot worse than Taco HTML Edit. I’ve been watching this one for several years and seen it develop into a pretty feature rich product.

SEEdit Mini is a lite version of the SEEdit Maxi editor. For free, it’s pretty good.

A promising looking program is WebCode. Though it is still a bit rough around the edges.

If you are an old time programmer you might like Aqua emacs.

Jext is a Java based programming editor.

Tidying your Code

A good utility to use on any web page is a syntax checker. It will help you avoid errors and possible web page failures. MacTidy is a simple program that can handle that little chore for you.

TidyService does the same thing but as an OS X Service.

If you write XHTML code, you might want to check out Validator, as it goes beyond simple validation and checks for XML correctness.

Email Encoders

With spam such a problem, it’s nice to be able to obscure your email addresses from email address harvesting bots. There are a few options. eMail-Encoder works well. This is a German program but is so simple that you shouldn’t need English instructions. Andrew has a Dashboard Widget that will do the same thing.

Tagging Services

Here are a couple of Services that you can use to wrap text in any Services aware program with HTML Tags. Tagging Service and Humane Text Service. They each use a simple tagging syntax to translate your text into HTML.

CSS Editors

Simple CSS is a nice, simple CSS 2 editor that uses dialog boxes to generate your CSS code.

Morphon CSS Editor is a Java based program that does a decent job of editing cascading style sheets. As with most Java programs, the interface is clunky.

FTP Clients

Cyberduck is a pretty full featured and stable FTP program for the Mac.

If you prefer two panel FTP try Fugu. It’s a little more primitive and only works with SFTP but it does work.

MySQL

There are a couple of nice front ends to MySQL, YourSQL and CocoaMySQL than can greatly speed up database development.

Extending iPhoto

iPhoto will create web ready photo galleries with a couple of clicks. The good news is that the process is very simple. The bad news is that the pages are boring, boring, boring. Enter Better iPhoto Templates. With this you get a nicer looking template set that you can edit yourself.

• Gallerie is a mature iPhoto (and others) export program for web galleries.
• webPhoto is a Java application that does much the same thing.
• [iPhoto Batch Enhancer]http://www.feroxsoft.de/ibe/download_en.html) Process more than one photo at a time.

Bypassing iPhoto

You don’t need to use iPhoto to create web photo albums. These programs will all take a folder full of photos and auto-magically turn them into web pages.

• jAlbum
• iGallery
• PhotoSite TimeSaviour
• WebAlbum
• Album Shaper

Editing Images

The most powerful free image editing programs aren’t regular Mac software but run in the Unix like BSD layer of OS X, under X-11. That is a separate topic. Here’s a list of more normal Mac offerings.

• ThumbsUp is a simple, drag-and-drop based utility to create thumbnails for a bunch of pictures at once.
• ImageWell is a simple image editor that’s easy to use. Good for single image resizing.
• Pixen Art Pixen is the best program for the pixel artist using Mac OS X. Specialized but cool.
• Seashore is a GIMP based Mac program that offers lots of features.
• Quickscale is a one trick pony, but it’s a very useful trick. Quickscale will batch scale lots of images at a time.
• Live Quartz and Image Tricks put graphical front ends on Tiger’s Quartz Image Effects. These are more for special effects than serious image editing.
• Image Play is a simple effects editing program.

Working with color

Web colors are specified by sets of numbers, either RGB or hexedecimal code. To translate what you see on your screen to something a web browser can use, try, X-ColorZ. I integrates with Apple’s Color Picker. If you prefer a stand alone application, Color Blender, does the job, as does iPalette.

Assorted Others

• 93 Photo Street make is easy to attach maps to photos. It makes it easy to display your images arranged by location instead of by time.
• Paparazzi! is a utility for grabbing screen shots of web pages.
• svnX is a cocoa front end for Subversion that allows you to browse your working copies, spot changes and operate on them, and also to browse logs and revisions.
• AddressWeb converts you Address Book to a web page.

Possibly related:

This entry was posted on Monday, April 3rd, 2006 at 12:36 am and is filed under Casual User, Resource Links. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.