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It's no surprise that professional web designers require a fair amount of gear, both hardware and software. Its mostly up to the designer which tools he/she likes to use. I can't tell specifically what to buy, or download form the internet, But i providing here an overview of the typical tools required by a web designer.
Bear in mind that while I have listed the most popoular commerical software tools available, many of them have freeware of shareware equivalents which you can download form the internet for free.
Equipments
To have a comfortable web site creation environment, web designers have find a few equipments.
A solid, Up-to-date computer. windows, Linux, or Macintosh is fine. Its always nice to have a super-fast machine when it come to developing web pages. because you will be running more then one application at a time. Most modern web sites require designers to work with sound and video editing software, which can only be run on fast and latest computer systems.
A large monitor screen. its not a requirement, but a large and high-resolution monitor makes life much easier. The larger your monitor is, the more windows and control panels you can open at the same time.
Extra memory. Becuase web designes tend to bounce between a number of applications, its a good idea to have enough RAM installed on your machine that allows you to have several memory-intensive programs running at the same time.
A scanner. You will need a good quality scanner to transfer raw contents to your computer, for use on the internet.
A digital camera. If you anticipate making your own graphics, you will need a good quality digital camera for creating your own images.
Softwares
There's no shortage for web development software for modern web designers. In the past most designing tools were designed originally for print. Today there are lots of wonderful tools created specifically for web design in mind, which make our designers life more easier.
Web page authoring
Web-authoring tools are similar to desktop publishing tools, but the end product is a web page (an html file and its related style sheet and images files). These tools provide a visual " WYSIWYG" (What You See Is What You Get) interface and shortcuts that save you from typing repetitive HTML and CSS. here are a few of them.
Adobe Dreamweaver. Its one of the most popular and loved tool of web designers, due to its clean code and advanced features. the current version of adode dreamweaver is CS3.
Microsoft Expression we. MS Expression is Microsoft's suite of professional design tools, it supports standard-compliant code and CSS-based layouts.
Nvu (Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X). Don't what to pay for above editors? Nvu is an open source tool that matches many of the features in Dreamweaver, still it is downloadable for free.
HTML editors
An HTML editor is a software application for creating web pages (as opposed to authoring tools) are designed to speed up the process of writing HTML by hand. But many professional web designers actually prefer to author HTML document by hand.
Although the HTML markup of a web page can be written with any text editor, specialized HTML editors can offer convenience and added functionality. For example, many HTML editors work not only with HTML, but also with related technologies such as CSS, XML and JavaScript or ECMAScript. Must designers recommend the following editors:
EditPlus is a text editor, HTML editor and programmers editor for Windows. While it can serve as a good Notepad replacement, it also offers many powerful features for Web page authors and programmers.
textPad (windows only). textPad is a simple and inexpensive plain-text code editor for windows.
Graphic software
All designers probably need to add pictures to their web pages, that's why images editing programs come in handy. Several graphics programs support animation, or digital video. I would like to recommend the following popular web graphic - creation tools:
Adobe Photoshop Photoshop is undeniably the industry standard for image creation in the web world. All professional web designers know how important photoshop is, and all try to know photoshop thoroughly.
Adobe Illustrator This vector drawing program is often used to create illustrations. Designers can output web graphics directly from Illustrator, or bring them into Photoshop for additional fine-tunning.
