To create a website you need a toolbox full of tools – software, add-ons and some more software. Perhaps in theory a simple text editor is enough to create necessary code. But in real life comfort comes first and you will need the following three tools to create a website as smoothly as possible.

1. A Ftp Client – FireFTP
Uploading files to your shared hosting account is a common bottleneck in the web development process. It is thus important to minimize programs used and make sure they include all the functions possible. FireFTP is a FireFox add-on that allows you to manage your files through an FTP client in one tab and preview the changes on your site in the other tab. This is integrated web development and will save you much time and sanity.

2. A Text Editor – EditPlus
According to us there are two types of text editors – the overly complicated and the too simple. EditPlus fits in somewhere in between as it has the simple design like Notepad but still comes with cool features like color coding, tabbing and pre-selecting of script language. For example – if you do not finish a piece of code correctly it will show much clearer as the color changes.

3. An Image Editor – Photoshop
While the two tools above are free to download, Photoshop isn’t. But we are going to assume that you actually can afford to buy PS and go ahead and recommend it as the third and final tool. With the text editor you get to define the web design by building stylesheet. An image editor however, is necessary to create the site’s graphic elements, such as buttons, headers, logo etc.

Using Photoshop you can even create the complete web design for your site, slice it up with the slice-tool and save it as both images and html.

These were three tools required to build a website – a FTP client, a text editor and an image editor. Now you have everything you need to program in javascript, PHP, Html or any letter based script language. You can build the web design, upload the image files to your and then apply them to appropriate div tag in the stylesheet.

This is your toolbox.