Website Development Resources

The Internet is filled with websites promoting various books, software, tutorials,  training and related services. We have tried to focus on a limited amount of resources we are familiar with or currently use ourselves.  Some of these links of these to recommended products, services and websites we are affiliates of and will receive a commission on any sales from this site. But we did not let this sway our decision on what to recommend and have included many others in which we receive no financial benefit for recommending.  You can select the appropriate link from the table below or simply scroll through the page.

Books There are too many books available to list them all here, but we chose some of our favorites.

Software We prefer the Adobe/Macromedia, but there are other more affordable options as well.

Links Some of these sites also offer products and services, but we chose only ones which we felt offered sound advice, tutorials and information.

Training Both on-line and classroom training

Recommended Web Development Books

These are only a few of our favourites. We purposely did not include any software books here; even though thee are some good ones out there we believe you would be better off with the training options posted further down the page.

Recommended Web Development Software

Web Site Development

Dreamweaver CS3 This is the premier website development tool, and is essential for any serious website developer. The downside is that it is extremely difficult to learn, but with the training solutions now available (see below for training solutions) the difficulties in learning this powerful progam has been lessened. Still, this is not for the novice and the cost is extremely high

HomeSite For those of you new to website development and HTML this is a great way to begin. It's code mark-up makes it easy to diffentiate the HTML from your content. It also is a good companion to Dreamweaver, and even lets you switch back and forth between the two. This is an affordable option.

Coffee Cup Software Coffee cup is newer to the market. Though we have not tried their products, we felt it necesssary to recomment an affordable solution. After doing some research we chose their web development tools. They have quite a few different products that will meet all your needs. Their products include a basic html editor, visual site designer, form builder, and even a program to add "flash" effects.

Image Editors

Photoshop CS3 This is the king of the image editors and as Dreaweaver is to web development this is very powerful and complex software and not for the novice. But like Dreamweaver with the on-line training options available, many of it's secrets are unleashed. For website graphics you certainly don't need an image editor this powerfull and will find that there are many features that you might never use. But still it is the cream of the crop, and it's cost relfects that.

Photoshop Elements This is a much scaled-down (both price and features) product, but should more than suffice for optimizing elements for the web.

Fireworks This was the first image editor designed specifically for the web. It is a great tool for creating entire websites by design; the software will convert your design to a table-based web page. This can be done in photoshop as well, but the process is not as intuitive. Fireworks is also excellent for creating rollovers and those "cool" drop-down menus you see so often on websites. This has all the power but is not nearly as expensive nor withthe steep learning curve.

Paintshop Pro This is the most affordable options. It can do most of the basic image correction and optimization as the other more expensive sofware programs but at a lower cost. As they say, you get a lot of bang for the buck.

Flash Flash is more than an image editor, it's an image animator. And while it's programming features open the power of this software you can still create a lot of amazing effects without it. Often Flash is used to creat cool effects and sometimes even entire websites but it also offers the ability to develop complex applications. However you use it, it is a lot of fun!

Search Engine Oprimization (software and services) These services and software are all quite expensive over time. We not only recommend all three but use them ourselves and becasue of the edge it gives us in our website optimization consulting.

Wordtracker This is a service that is offered for a monthly fee, and is the best way to find unique keywords for high rankings in search engines.

Keyword Elite Software for analyzing ppc (pay per click) options in Google Adwords.

Web Position Another software product for analyzing website search engine positioning and webpage optimizing.

Other Recommend Software

FTP Programs It is not neccessary to purchase an FTP (file transfer protocol) which is a program that transfer files between your computer and your web host since most of the website development software programs offer FTP features. But the FTP programs we like are more for the advanced user and offer features that the build-in ones don't. Our two favorites are WS_FTP and SmartFTP; both are reasonably priced and offere advanced options.

XML Editors You probably don't need a separate xml editor, even Dreamweaver offers XML coding features. But if you work extensively with XML files then a couple software titles really stand out. They are: Altova's xmlspy and Stylus Studio's XML editor.

CSS Editors Probably the least necessary of the editors but we couldn't help but like TopStyle Pro. It's a great tool for learning the capabilities of CSS Style Sheets. It is also a very good HTML editor as well.

Recommended Web Development Links

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Recommended Web Development Training

In our recommended book section we have omitted any software and programming training books; that is because we believe there are some great on-line training solutions out there. Two of our favorite are "Total Training" and "Lynda.com. Both of these sites offer training for a very reasonable monthly fee which includes access to numberous training classes. We endorse these programs because we use them ourselves. For those of you who prefer a more traditional classroom environment with an instructor, we recomment Westlake Training, which has locations throughout the United States. Their insturctors are extremely qualified and offer support long after the class is over. For more information visits their websites:

Total Training was the leader in Adobe/Macromedia software training. They have expanded to include web programming and software as well.

Lynda.com is a website developed based on the Lynda Weinman's hands-on-training series of books. She has been one of the leders in web development training since 1995 when her ground-breaking book "Designing Web Graphics" first came out.

Westlake has locations in Washington DC, Chicago, New York City, Atlanta, and San Jose. They offer intensive hands-on classes in web programming, development and design.