In this forum thread we will discuss the "tools of the trade". What software tools do you use to develop websites and manage your web development business and WHY?

As a software engineer my toolset is XTReME but this is due to the various forms of development we as a business are contracted to do. For example, I use Microsoft Visual Studio quite a bit for applications development.  Without going into a dissertation I am going to let you know the "base tools" we use and why. Some may surprise you, maybe not.

1. Microsoft Office

We use MS Office ALOT. Within we develop out business proposals to clients. We do nothing "fixed price" as every client is different. We communicate with them, gauge their needs as they relay them, gauge their skill set and we meet at a later date with our ideas, their ideas and a proposal. We used Word to make outlines of all the ideas and concepts, we use Excel to build out the "site options" aka: Basic site, Advanced Site, The Works... We present three options to all clients.

2. MindMap Pro

This (and other idea gathering and organizing) software is just AWESOME for development be it applications or web development. It allows you to create various forms of charts that are valuable during the development cycle but ALSO impress the crap out of your clients. You can start with things such as simple charts showing them various web abilities, for example, Amazon affiliate abilities step by step.

PRESENTATION COUNTS... EVERYTHING is judged by people be that websites or how you wish to attract customers to your development business. PRESENTATION IS EVERYTHING.

3. PaintShop Pro - Fireworks 8

Two fine image editors. We use Paintshop much more than Fireworks for graphics, logo creation etc. We tend use Fireworks for "slicing" things up or specialization of images. You mean we DONT use Photoshop? Very rarely. We have found that Photoshop's complexity is usually not needed for 95% of web design. In fact often its best to not get all creative and seek and slice out graphics where needed from google searches etc. But is'nt that sleezy? I dont subscribe to the Church of Web Purity I do subscribe to the "Do whats needed to succeed cult".

As far as image creation goes... I suck duck. However, my other half is AWESOME at it.

If you do not have a person who "Has the eye" for art and imaging you need find someone. I am fortunate, my lady is awesome at it. But... Believe it or not you can try and find high schoolers for example in art classes that are VERY good at digital art and they are MORE than happy to make some side dough at VERY reasonable rates!

4. Dreamweaver, Microsoft Expression Web, PSPad

Dreamweaver is an AWESOME web editor, with the myriads of plugin's and consistent user interface it is WONDERFUL for building static sites and sites that have some dyanmic content. Expression Web is my editor of choice for ASP.NET based work. PSPad is just a fantastic all around "editor" and fills in all the gaps nicely.

5. Flash, Swish & Namo Web Editor

This is obvious... FLASH stuff. Generally speaking we only use flash to "accent" web sites. In time as Microsoft Silverlight, Flash and platforms such as Visual Studio and Flex Builder advance these more interactive environments will actually become the standards for web sites. Namo we use to "Rip Flash"... Its good for that. If you want a Flash item and want modify it Namo does a decent job of reverse engineering things.

6. Joomla CMS, Drupal CMS, SubDreamer

While I have not expored every "CMS" on the planet as there are many and more coming all the time these are what we have used. Our selection of which to use really depends on our client and our clients needs. When they need a dynamic site, frequent updates etc. whether they manage it or whether we maintain it all need be relayed to the client.

Joomla is nice, easy, effective though at times requires tweaking PHP code and obviously dealing with lots of formatting crap since nothing is standardized for the most part. Joomla has HORRIBLE workflow when considering a client maintaining their own site. Drupal is more ghastly from the developer point of view (though getting better) but does allow for the developer to set up good permissions (not excellent) and workflow for the client. For "EASY" sake, SubDreamer... Anyone can learn to use this and its a damned fine CMS.

7. Portals

I've done some sites with DotNetNuke (ASP.NET based portal) and its pretty decent. I've yet to find a PHP Portal worth a crap. For the past few months I've also been playing with a WONDERFUL portal application called Liferay, it is Java based... its efficient, AWESOME in capability, TRASHES any CMS noted above (except for the fact "Addons" are limited) and its DAMNED fast. It is a "WORLD CLASS" Enterprise level application... period. It will run rings around any of the above CMS's with its hands tied behind its back. Literally.

8. eCommerce

LOTS of these applications out there and many are really good, many suck, many are someplace inbetween. eCommerce is Pop pOP PoP POpUlar among those wanting websites. Ive played a bit with the rather new Open Source "Magento" and I just cant say who the target client is for Magento. Clearly it appears pointed at the business that wants a powerhouse eCommerce solution. Unfortunately most people wanting to engage in eCommerce are not power house salesman.

Actinic Catalog is a wonderful eCommerce package for "most people" though somewhat "icky" to develop "templating for". It has a client that is a Windows program and thus the client is able to administrate his/her/their site right from a Windows PC... This is VERY attractive as clients can (usually) operate a PC. It has "One click" uploads for product changes, site changes etc. 1 Click order downloads etc.

SunShop... If you've not tried it, pretty cool little shop program. Its quite easy to design for in templates, it has many really nice plugin's including absolutely painless integration with everything from PayPal to every merchant account type/provider on the planet. Wish lists, featured items, discounts tickets, gift certificates, reviews and more. Its EXTREMELY simple to administrate which is VERY nice when it comes to clients. So, power, performance and easy to setup, easy for your client to use. It lacks some things, video for example would be nice. But for your average small business its really quite good. In fact.... I am considering coding up a bridge for it so it can be seamlessly used with Joomla CMS. SubShop also has static page generation ability built in, very nice for Search Engine ranking.

While we are on that subject... Joomla, Drupal, CMS developers.... REALIZE that your iFRAME ability in these applications are VERY under utilized in sites. While for example you might be itching to have a DECENT mass mailer application that works nice with your CMS based site(s) or eCommerce package or Amazon Affiliate Store etc... You can use iFrame's to bring EXCEPTIONAL scripts seamlessly integrating to your CMS based webs!

-----

Of course, there are other tools we use and I will get to them as we move ahead in this topic.... BUT before I finish this post....

ALL of us tend to have a PC laying around growing dust. If you have a Pentium 4, AMD x64 or even an older AMD XP1800+ etc. machine laying around I highly recommend you set it up as a development server. Get a cheap router or network switch. Put Win XP on the system and download XAMPP which is a easy to install (literally) environment where you get Apache, mySQL, PHP 4 & 5 and much more. It will SPEED your "PHP" based site development time in LARGE fashion.

At the sametime the machine can serve as a backup place for all your files and sites, act as a print server and then some.

Please post what tools you use and WHY...

Until Next Time!

~Meowser~

In this forum thread we will discuss the "tools of the trade". What software tools do you use to develop websites and manage your web development business and WHY?

As a software engineer my toolset is XTReME but this is due to the various forms of development we as a business are contracted to do. For example, I use Microsoft Visual Studio quite a bit for applications development.  Without going into a dissertation I am going to let you know the "base tools" we use and why. Some may surprise you, maybe not.

1. Microsoft Office

We use MS Office ALOT. Within we develop out business proposals to clients. We do nothing "fixed price" as every client is different. We communicate with them, gauge their needs as they relay them, gauge their skill set and we meet at a later date with our ideas, their ideas and a proposal. We used Word to make outlines of all the ideas and concepts, we use Excel to build out the "site options" aka: Basic site, Advanced Site, The Works... We present three options to all clients.

2. MindMap Pro

This (and other idea gathering and organizing) software is just AWESOME for development be it applications or web development. It allows you to create various forms of charts that are valuable during the development cycle but ALSO impress the crap out of your clients. You can start with things such as simple charts showing them various web abilities, for example, Amazon affiliate abilities step by step.

PRESENTATION COUNTS... EVERYTHING is judged by people be that websites or how you wish to attract customers to your development business. PRESENTATION IS EVERYTHING.

3. PaintShop Pro - Fireworks 8

Two fine image editors. We use Paintshop much more than Fireworks for graphics, logo creation etc. We tend use Fireworks for "slicing" things up or specialization of images. You mean we DONT use Photoshop? Very rarely. We have found that Photoshop's complexity is usually not needed for 95% of web design. In fact often its best to not get all creative and seek and slice out graphics where needed from google searches etc. But is'nt that sleezy? I dont subscribe to the Church of Web Purity I do subscribe to the "Do whats needed to succeed cult".

As far as image creation goes... I suck duck. However, my other half is AWESOME at it.

If you do not have a person who "Has the eye" for art and imaging you need find someone. I am fortunate, my lady is awesome at it. But... Believe it or not you can try and find high schoolers for example in art classes that are VERY good at digital art and they are MORE than happy to make some side dough at VERY reasonable rates!

4. Dreamweaver, Microsoft Expression Web, PSPad

Dreamweaver is an AWESOME web editor, with the myriads of plugin's and consistent user interface it is WONDERFUL for building static sites and sites that have some dyanmic content. Expression Web is my editor of choice for ASP.NET based work. PSPad is just a fantastic all around "editor" and fills in all the gaps nicely.

5. Flash, Swish & Namo Web Editor

This is obvious... FLASH stuff. Generally speaking we only use flash to "accent" web sites. In time as Microsoft Silverlight, Flash and platforms such as Visual Studio and Flex Builder advance these more interactive environments will actually become the standards for web sites. Namo we use to "Rip Flash"... Its good for that. If you want a Flash item and want modify it Namo does a decent job of reverse engineering things.

6. Joomla CMS, Drupal CMS, SubDreamer

While I have not expored every "CMS" on the planet as there are many and more coming all the time these are what we have used. Our selection of which to use really depends on our client and our clients needs. When they need a dynamic site, frequent updates etc. whether they manage it or whether we maintain it all need be relayed to the client.

Joomla is nice, easy, effective though at times requires tweaking PHP code and obviously dealing with lots of formatting crap since nothing is standardized for the most part. Joomla has HORRIBLE workflow when considering a client maintaining their own site. Drupal is more ghastly from the developer point of view (though getting better) but does allow for the developer to set up good permissions (not excellent) and workflow for the client. For "EASY" sake, SubDreamer... Anyone can learn to use this and its a damned fine CMS.

7. Portals

I've done some sites with DotNetNuke (ASP.NET based portal) and its pretty decent. I've yet to find a PHP Portal worth a crap. For the past few months I've also been playing with a WONDERFUL portal application called Liferay, it is Java based... its efficient, AWESOME in capability, TRASHES any CMS noted above (except for the fact "Addons" are limited) and its DAMNED fast. It is a "WORLD CLASS" Enterprise level application... period. It will run rings around any of the above CMS's with its hands tied behind its back. Literally.

8. eCommerce

LOTS of these applications out there and many are really good, many suck, many are someplace inbetween. eCommerce is Pop pOP PoP POpUlar among those wanting websites. Ive played a bit with the rather new Open Source "Magento" and I just cant say who the target client is for Magento. Clearly it appears pointed at the business that wants a powerhouse eCommerce solution. Unfortunately most people wanting to engage in eCommerce are not power house salesman.

Actinic Catalog is a wonderful eCommerce package for "most people" though somewhat "icky" to develop "templating for". It has a client that is a Windows program and thus the client is able to administrate his/her/their site right from a Windows PC... This is VERY attractive as clients can (usually) operate a PC. It has "One click" uploads for product changes, site changes etc. 1 Click order downloads etc.

SunShop... If you've not tried it, pretty cool little shop program. Its quite easy to design for in templates, it has many really nice plugin's including absolutely painless integration with everything from PayPal to every merchant account type/provider on the planet. Wish lists, featured items, discounts tickets, gift certificates, reviews and more. Its EXTREMELY simple to administrate which is VERY nice when it comes to clients. So, power, performance and easy to setup, easy for your client to use. It lacks some things, video for example would be nice. But for your average small business its really quite good. In fact.... I am considering coding up a bridge for it so it can be seamlessly used with Joomla CMS. SubShop also has static page generation ability built in, very nice for Search Engine ranking.

While we are on that subject... Joomla, Drupal, CMS developers.... REALIZE that your iFRAME ability in these applications are VERY under utilized in sites. While for example you might be itching to have a DECENT mass mailer application that works nice with your CMS based site(s) or eCommerce package or Amazon Affiliate Store etc... You can use iFrame's to bring EXCEPTIONAL scripts seamlessly integrating to your CMS based webs!

-----

Of course, there are other tools we use and I will get to them as we move ahead in this topic.... BUT before I finish this post....

ALL of us tend to have a PC laying around growing dust. If you have a Pentium 4, AMD x64 or even an older AMD XP1800+ etc. machine laying around I highly recommend you set it up as a development server. Get a cheap router or network switch. Put Win XP on the system and download XAMPP which is a easy to install (literally) environment where you get Apache, mySQL, PHP 4 & 5 and much more. It will SPEED your "PHP" based site development time in LARGE fashion.

At the sametime the machine can serve as a backup place for all your files and sites, act as a print server and then some.

Please post what tools you use and WHY...

Until Next Time!

~Meowser~

2 plugins that have saved me a ton of time are

web developer tools http://anonym.to/?https://addons.mozilla.o...irefox/addon/60

and firebug http://anonym.to/?https://addons.mozilla.o...efox/addon/1843

whether checking css, images or javascript.these tools are lifesavers for me

Very informative info Meowser! Thanks for this section.

What have you been using for Quickbooks integration for people. An example ive faced lately is a customer taking phone and web orders. All orders are hand put into QB. They need real time inventory on the website. Closest ive found is something like Volusion or Core Commerce, but its only 1 way (takes info from software -> QB).

My best tools are Dreamweaver, Web Developer Firefox toolbar, YSlow plugin for Firebug, Joomla.

Javascript compression: http://dean.edwards.name/packer/
CSS Compressor: http://www.cssdrive.com/index.php/main/csscompressor/

Very informative info Meowser! Thanks for this section.

What have you been using for Quickbooks integration for people. An example ive faced lately is a customer taking phone and web orders. All orders are hand put into QB. They need real time inventory on the website. Closest ive found is something like Volusion or Core Commerce, but its only 1 way (takes info from software -> QB).

My best tools are Dreamweaver, Web Developer Firefox toolbar, YSlow plugin for Firebug, Joomla.

Javascript compression: http://dean.edwards.name/packer/
CSS Compressor: http://www.cssdrive.com/index.php/main/csscompressor/

Hi!

  There are many eCommerce packages that deal well with Quickbooks. Actinic Catalog is good albeit a tad piecemeal. I believe "Shopsite" works with QB last I recall and of course Miva Merchant.

   Problem with alot of the eCommerce stuff out there is they all started at  "Point A" Version 1,0 lets say and as they version new release alot of the programmation was just "popped in" rather than WELL THOUGHT OUT. Then as Versioning continues those changes dont fit right with new features and things end up a mess especially in usability.

Hi!

  There are many eCommerce packages that deal well with Quickbooks. Actinic Catalog is good albeit a tad piecemeal. I believe "Shopsite" works with QB last I recall and of course Miva Merchant.

   Problem with alot of the eCommerce stuff out there is they all started at  "Point A" Version 1,0 lets say and as they version new release alot of the programmation was just "popped in" rather than WELL THOUGHT OUT. Then as Versioning continues those changes dont fit right with new features and things end up a mess especially in usability.

Seems good... Most of all keyword research it too important for site success.
Using Keyword Elite to find the best keywords is really appreciated.

I believe that everyone of us is actually using a lot of different software. A lot more than a several applications mentioning but here's what I'm currently using on a daily basis

1. Of course - a web server - Linux, Apache, PHP, MySQL, Postfix, AWstats etc.

2. CMS systems - drupal and joomla. I could say that drupal is far more flexible but if you don't have any PHP knowledge (I almost don't) it could be tricky to do some stuff and there are a lot less templates for it. On the other hand Joomla is good for using stuff as they are and modify them a lot and have tons of dozens of beautiful templates to choose from.

3. Ticket and developing system - trac. Nice software with just the right things to do bug tracking, keeping notes on the project work, keep the development process under control, take care of the roadmap etc.

4. Thunderbird with sunbird and lightning add-ons for organizing my correspondence,  my work, and my spare time

5. Google webmaster tools and google analytics- a good place to start analizing work work, google keyword tool and google trends - good toools to know at which keywords to focus on

6. Firefox extensions - Firebug with Yahoo Slow - for optimizing the speed of websites

7. Photoshop, Dreamweaver, GIMP for design

8. Google - for finding answers

Lolz for sure Google is your mate

I do use a ton of stuffs but I'm streamlining alot of what I do. I mainly develop on Joomla as it's now got to the point where I can throw up a joomla site and get it filled up in around an hour. Editing etc takes longer but it's nice to just be able to 'splurge' 60-70 per cent of your workload in a short space of time.

I'm an office addict so use all the MS applications and integrate tightly with my clients through these. Think shared calendars and groupware access on my main site etc Keeps everyone in the picture and clients get less 'twitchy' if they can see the developmental milestones...

For development and editing I use my gf lolz But she mainly uses Adobe illustrator/Photoshop and Rhinoceros for 3D development and product design.

For SEO I spend hours doing keyword research through Googles own keyword tool and SEO elite.

That's about it really!

Google is everyone's slut  

I'm a google web-slut too, I just wish everything was easier to find... I think Google should erase anything I dont presently need or wont need in the future. Then they would have so much time on their hands they could do my work too. SCHWEET! LOL.

While we're on the topic of dEVeloPmEnT ToolZ _{(hard to type with paws ya know!)...}

Some years back I ran across Xampp (Clickie Here)

Its easy as takin' a poop to set up and gives you apache, php, mySQL, Perl and then some! Even Tomcat (Meowie wow!)

What I did was take an older computer, its presently an Athlon XP 1800+ with a gig of ram and two 40 GB hard drives. A real powerhouse!

I mounted it, well... we cats do our thing ya know... Then I mounted Xampp on it. I set it up as a static IP address on our PunyLan © The Cat, and set up a static port address to match on our router.

It has ZERO internet access (so no webdogs can try actually use it as a server). For development its wonderful. I and my feline friend can develop sites and do collaborative work. Then when done we just pack it all up, FTP it up to a webserver, configure whatever we need and done-ski's. _{(FTP meaning upload, not what cats consider that acronym which is "f' to please")}

We dangled a black and white and color laser printer off the same PC so it also acts as a nice print server. Its only lacking is no RAID, it'd be nice to just store all data on it and have it mirror to another drive.

Since it has no web access things such as RSS feeds and certain forms of development that require web access.... But, when we need to we can enable its access to the web lickity split and then shut it back off as warranted.

Its a great way to test Scriptz and such as well!

While I'm at it...

It sure does take some time to run this area of Portaliz and we have a LONNNNG ways to go my fellow 4 paws. I was delighted that Portaliz allowed me to take part in this and help at what I consider (and I bet you do too!) one of the absolute BEST sites on the net for us tinklers... ooops... tinkerers.

Please let me and the fantastic Portaliz staff know our efforts are appreciated by making a small donation to the site. They feed me

Hi meowser - did you try setting up IPtables on the this machine or maybe on your router. This way you can open just some ports for this machine or even no ports to be visual to the rest of the world but your box can have access to internet.

Old boxes are GREAT for such servers. I actually started my first site on such machine - Sempron 2200+, 512mb RAM, 80GB HDD. Now I'm setting the same machine as my stand alone dev. server. LAMP is also great and it can do miracles with old hardware and some optimizations - Xcache, Memcached...

While on the subject. Have some you guys experience with sites that overload the CPU usage and needed to do a separate server for APP and DB for example?

Halo!

Yep... Old machines make wonderful knock about boxes! We use Xampp insted of a straight Linux install as its fast, simple to us, turn it on, turn it off in an instant etc. Its not a secure environment however and never was intended to be. The "Apache Friends" folks who maintain Xampp state this right "out of the box" to not attempt actually using it as a live web server. Its meant as a quick, 1...2...3... setup of AMP, like WAMP or MAMP etc. AMP is whats needed essentially to do work and thats what we focus on.

In regards to the web server question, indeed... Hostings firms are a hard area to get solid responses from in regards to everything/anything. They are in business and as such, making money is the goal.

Shared servers are often "oversold" which if one bitches about it to most hosts and says, "Well I have 25 customer sites w/ yuse' guyz' that I will put elsewhere" they will move your domain/server space to a less crowded server.

The "Overload" I assume means "Over CPU Quota" that some host firms RAG about absolutely is BS, I got into this with a clients site at Apollo with them. Why! They had no idea who they was messin' with!!!! I (as noted) am a programmer and I know CPU's, Assembler, Registers, Addressing, Opcodes, operands and clock cycles! Bits, Bytes & Nybbles! LOL. Not that I've had much need to code anything in assembler in years. Anyways... They claim that a "site" is using too much CPU and essentially there is NO effective way to measure that. Profiling software exists for applications development as well as measuring server performance. However, THEY install Apache, PHP, MySQL and who knows what else? ALL thats stuff eats CPU. So... simple. I tell em' "Show me, I am fully aware of CPU's, Clock Cycles etc". Show me. The bottom line is they cant or wont. Usually they are trying to upsell.

Most host firms that have a good idea of what they are doing do run seperate database servers. BEWARE host firms that have mySQL or MSSQL on the same server as your domain. They tend to say "Unlimited database size" and you'll find the performance curve will tend to suffer as one grows degrading in a much faster fashion than seems sensible.

Always look for hosting that has a seperate DB server. They tend to limit em', like 150MB of space for example.

A good new thread area here might be hosting yes?

I run a website on a microsoft server (html coding)
I want to run a live chat and support option on the website so potential customers can contact me
I assume I need ASP coding on the website with an application on my office PC
what do you recommend using (freeware and/or shareware) ; considering my budget is minimal to non-existent

your help is appreciated

So you have a static website made with say Microsoft Frontpage I presume or something similar such as done with Dreamweaver and your site is running via Microsoft IIs (Internet Information Server) NOT Microsoft PWS (Personal Web Server)?

You do not necessarily need use ASP.NET especially if your hosting with a firm such as DiscountASP.Net for example (wonderful hosting firm).

Most webservers via hosting firms running MS IIs also have PHP some even have mySQL (database server) as well as of course Microsoft SQL Server (database server).

I am assuming by your brief description your running MS IIs such as comes with Windows XP Pro and your site runs out of the WWWRoot.

This means installing PHP is probably something you dont want deal with.

There are several Chat programs freely available for ASP.NET. I've heard Chatterbox.net is good. Its free from what I remember and uses an XML file to keep the chat log/feed .vs. many which use MS SQL server which you probably do not want get into either.

You can of course do some Google Searches for "FREE ASP.NET CHAT" and see what turns up, probably quite a few out there but again... you generally want steer clear of any that will be using SQL Server unless you know how to configure it OR the Chat Server itself will configure it for you (unlikely). MS SQL Server is considerably more complex and capable than say mySQL (albeit not as speedy). MS SQL is comparable to Oracle if you will... Its not just based around "Web services" but "Applications DB services" as well.

Your other choice which actually might be best is looking for a FLASH based Chat program. Essentially you would make a new web page on your site, embed the Flash Object call (just like any Flash)... slap a navigation link in you other page(s) and away you go. Obviously for you TO chat you will need navigate to your site (via say localhost ie: http://localhost).

The only Flash based Chat i've played about with is FlashChat, I believe it has a mode that does not require a database... But again, a search at google for "FREE FLASH CHAT" ought turn up some Adobe Flash Applications. The only downside to this is whomever is coming in to chat will need Flash Player installed on their system which 90%+ people do.

With the ASP.NET solution that wouldnt be a requirement and youd want make sure (irregardless really) that your machine has ASP.NET 2.0 or newer on it. ASP.NET 1.1 was a slug, 2.0 is beautiful and 3.0/3.5 are getting to the realm of becoming the scourge of the Net... Already would be if it were not for Java.

Hope this helps!

~Meowser~