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My Favourite Web Design Tools

Aug 2009

As a website developer I have my preferred software options. I have spent years looking at various products to use for different site requirements. In my opinion the best web design and development software is quite often open-source. I have spent a lot of time learning the tools below and use them to customise many websites.

Open-source quite simply means FREE. The promise of open source is better quality, higher reliability, more flexibility, and lower cost. Open source means everyone can get access to the original code and develop add-on’s, plug-ins and extra functionality. It means a world of coders / developers / experts can develop the product and YOU get all that for FREE! Where possible and where I appropriate try to use open source technology.

What follows are some brief descriptions of some of the tools I use to build websites.

Discussion Boards (Forums):

SMF (Simple Machines Forum)
A popular choice for a full featured “forums” or “bulletin board”

Ecommerce / Shopping Carts:

ZenCart
User-friendly open source shopping cart system. Been around for years and has a great development community with loads of plugins to suit every requirement for an online shopping cart.

Portals/CMS/Blogs:

Website baker
A very simple CMS portal site with many modules and add ons available, used where a very simple cms is required and ease of use for client neccesary.
WordPress
Great tool for managing your own personal blogging site or mini portal. Tons of add-ons, lots more functionality than website baker and therefore only used where a more complex site is anticipated.

Real Estate CMS:

Open realty
Open-Realty® is an open source web based real estate listing management application. It is intended to be both easy to setup and use.

Online Survey Software:

Lime Survey
LimeSurvey is in my opionion the best onlie survey making tool around. LimeSurvey has a lot of features. LimeSurvey basically contains everything you need for doing nearly every survey with grace.

Live Chat Software:

Crafty Syntax
Crafty Syntax Live Help is Free and easy to use and install. Other features include the ability to create your own questions, auto inviting visitors, referer tracking, page tracking, multiple chat sessions, sound alert, leave a message if offline, quick responses, and multiple operators.