Recommended Third-Party Products

Browsing | Building

We've obviously spent some time online, and we've also spent some time building web sites. Here are a few items you will find useful for both.

browsing?

If you're an avid Internet user, we commend to you the following browsers:

Safari (Mac) ~ This browser is leading the charge as far as speed and standards-compliance. If you're lucky enough to have Apple's new Tiger operating system, you have probably experienced this for yourself.

Firefox (Windows or Mac) ~ The coming-of-age of the Mozilla browser. Firefox has taken the Internet by storm, snatching nearly 10% of the browser share in roughly seven months. While every browser faces security issues, Firefox's open source team has hopped on them quickly, and the avoidance of Microsoft's ActiveX controls has been a big security plus. In addition, Firefox is considerably more standards-compliant than Internet Explorer.

Opera (Windows, Mac, Linux) ~ Innovative and lightweight, Opera has been cutting-edge since its introduction. There is a low-cost commercial version which gets rid of the advertising, but the free version is not cluttered with ads either.

building?

So you want to do some web building of your own? Here are some products we use and recommend:

Web editing

Macromedia Dreamweaver 8 ~ Simply the standard that all web editors are measured against.

Graphical editing

Macromedia Fireworks 8 ~ A fraction of the cost of Photoshop and easier to use. If all your graphics are for the web, this is a great choice.

The GIMP ~ It's open source, so pay no money. Great graphical editing power, but one must admit that it has a bit of a steep learning curve.

FTP

SmartFTP ~ It's a free download for non-commercial users. If you're making a buck, it's still a bargain at $36.95 (single-user license). We find it to be more user-friendly than competitors such as WS_FTP.

Get it all

Macromedia Studio 8 ~ If you're getting Dreamweaver and Fireworks, you may as well pay just a little bit more and get Studio. Then you'll have Flash thrown in.

Books

If you're building web sites, you need a sound understanding of HTML and Cascading Style Sheets. For the latter, I unreservedly recommend Eric Meyer's Cascading Style Sheets: The Definitive Guide. Its title is not an overstatement.

As for HTML, to date I haven't found anything better than Elizabeth Castro's HTML for the World Wide Web with XHTML and CSS

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