Explore

A lot of designers without any research buy most popular tools such as Photoshop and other Adobe tools, although never use all their capabilities. It is important to know that there are free applications that can be used for web design and which do not fall behind for expensive professional tools. Before you spend your money on a set of applications that never fully exploited, determine your requirements and search the Internet for available solutions.

My choice

Here I will mention only those applications that I use in my work, it does not mean that there are other alternatives that you can find a simple internet search. In my work I have tried many solutions but the following applications have proven to be the best.

OS

Ubuntu : Super-fast and great-looking, Ubuntu is a secure, intuitive operating system that powers desktops, servers, netbooks and laptops. Ubuntu is, and always will be, absolutely free.

Image Manipulation

GIMP : GIMP is an acronym for GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is a freely distributed program for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring. It has many capabilities. It can be used as a simple paint program, an expert quality photo retouching program, an online batch processing system, a mass production image renderer, an image format converter, etc. GIMP is expandable and extensible. It is designed to be augmented with plug-ins and extensions to do just about anything. The advanced scripting interface allows everything from the simplest task to the most complex image manipulation procedures to be easily scripted. GIMP is written and developed under X11 on UNIX platforms. But basically the same code also runs on MS Windows and Mac OS X.

IDE for coding

Geany : Geany is a small and lightweight Integrated Development Environment. It was developed to provide a small and fast IDE, which has only a few dependencies from other packages. Geany is known to run under Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, MacOS X, AIX v5.3, Solaris Express and Windows. More generally, it should run on every platform, which is supported by the GTK libraries. Only the Windows port of Geany is missing some features.

FTP client and server

Filezilla : FileZilla Client is a fast and reliable cross-platform FTP, FTPS and SFTP client with lots of useful features and an intuitive graphical user interface.

Testing your site on local PC ( Apache, MySQL, PHP, Perl … )

XAMPP : XAMPP is an easy to install Apache distribution containing MySQL, PHP and Perl. XAMPP is really very easy to install and to use – just download, extract and start. At the moment there are four XAMPP distributions: XAMPP for Linux, XAMPP for Windows, XAMPP for Mac OS X and XAMPP for Solaris.

Video editor

OpenShot : OpenShot is free non-linear video editor for Linux. OpenShot’s Features include: Support for many video, audio, and image formats (based on FFmpeg), gnome integration (drag and drop support), multiple tracks, clip resizing, trimming, snapping, and cutting, video transitions with real-time previews, compositing, image overlays, watermarks, title templates, title creation, SVG friendly, to create and include titles and credits … and more.

Conclusion

Hope this article was helpfull and that you found some new interesting app which is free and usefull for your work.

Themers

Many designers work only on developing free and payed themes for different content management systems. Changing theme is easy and fast way to refresh your website with new design and make it more interesting for visitors and members. Every CMS is using different template engine so you’ll need to learn all their features and differences if you want to develop themes for more than one CMS. Choosing one CMS for developing themes makes your job easier but it also makes your customers base smaller.

My experience

During my work I have tried numerous different cms solutions, because I did not know their characteristics, advantages and disadvantages. I spent a lot of time testing all their features before finally ending up with CMS which offered all i needed. When you decide to develop themes for some CMS you should have in mind those few requirements.

Documentation

You will need appropriate documentation ( wiki, tutorials or books ) which will help you learn fast all whats needed for theme developement.

Community

CMS with good forums and large community offers better support, so if you stuck with some problem you’ll find solution easier and faster with help and support of others. Large community means many sites are powered by that CMS and it makes finding customers for your themes easier.

Template engine

Fast, logical template engine makes your coding faster and easier ( for example use of shortcodes in e107 CMS {HEADER}, {SITELINKS} ). Every designer wants his final product to look as close to what was envisioned in its original design.

Plugins

More plugins means more features which can be implemented into website fast and easy, without need to create custom solutions.

My choice?

My first themes were developed for e107 CMS, I made more then 100 free, premium and custom themes for this CMS. I also completly recoded their templates into pure CSS removing tables from layouts. Bad thing was that this CMS really has bad support, no enough documentation and it has slow developement. All those reasons were enough to find new CMS which was easier to work with. I worked with joomla and drupal before ending with wordpress which provided all i need for my work. Huge community and great support with more than enough documentation and plugins make this cms perfect for my work. All i design in gimp is easily coded into nice theme and brought to life online.

Conclusion

This article isn’t there to advertise wordpress as CMS but only to give you some guides which could help you to make right choice.