by Charlie Morris

A Do-it-Yourself Webmaster's Kit

Like any craftsman, a Webmaster or Web designer needs a set of good quality tools. Unlike most other crafts, a lot of fine Web tools are cheap or even free. Even better, you can read reviews of lots of cool tools, and even download them, right here at the good old Web Developer's Journal. This article is a list of suggestions for your toolbox, and serves as an overview of the various tutorials, reviews, downloads and other stuff available here at the WDJ.
Revised November 29, 1999

To create and maintain a Web site, you need:

• Editing software to create your HTML pages, as well as graphic and possibly audio editing packages.
• Browsers to preview your work.
• FTP and Telnet to communicate with your Web server.
• If you're running ads, ad management and log analysis systems.
• Lots of other handy little goodies.

Nowadays there are several packages available that claim to be a "Complete Solution," incorporating several different functions into one program or suite. Examples are Net Objects Fusion, Macromedia Dreamweaver (good), and Microsoft FrontPage (evil). Click on the preceding words to read a review of each one. They are all different, and each has its strengths and weaknesses, but all offer a more or less prepackaged approach to Web design. If you'd rather assemble a do-it-yourself toolbox, read on.

The first piece of the puzzle is a good word processor. HTML can simply be typed in by hand in any word processor and saved as an HTML file. Of course, it's much easier to generate HTML with a proper HTML editor, but a powerful word processor is essential for the pre-HTML stage. As an editor, I need the most powerful character-crunching machine I can get. When you receive articles from a variety of different writers, there are some cleaning chores to do, to say the least. A better analogy might be fumigation! If I only had a dollar for every malapropism and grammatical gaffe I have expunged from the work of so-called professional writers...

Sorry. Back to our topic. Whatever kind of a Web site you're running, you'll be doing various text editing tasks that will go much faster if you have a powerful word processor and learn how to use it. In fact, it's awful handy to have...dare I say it? An office suite. Yes, I use Office 97, and for the most part I find it excellent. I use it to clean up and spell-check articles that I receive, then export the text to my HTML editor. You can even create a document in Word and save it as HTML. Unfortunately, that option doesn't really work, but I'm sure it will a version or two from now. If you don't care for Microsoft stuff, check out the Corel suite, assuming they haven't given up the ghost yet. They've put together a contender that includes WordPerfect, Quattro Pro, and of course a database.

Now to create some HTML. There are lots of cheap shareware HTML editors out there, including UltraEdit, FlexEd, Hotdog, HotMeTaL, Nachos, and more. We're kind of partial to Homesite. For the Mac, there are BBedit and World Wide Web Weaver. Click here to go to our Download Page and get you one! These all work a little differently, but basically what you get is a word processor with shortcut icons for the HTML tags. They allow varying degrees of customization.

Another essential tool is a search-and-replace utility. If the boss wants to change some little detail that appears on lots of pages, are you going to go through and re-code each one? No sir. You are going to do a search-and-replace over multiple files. There are a couple of shareware utilities out there that work fine. A good one is called simply "Search-and-Replace," and is made by Funduc Software. One of the things we like about HomeSite is that it includes a search-and-replace function.

Once you've written your HTML pages, you need a browser to see them. Netscape Navigator and Microsoft Explorer are the biggies. At the moment, these two are engaged in a silly arms race, and the latest versions of each are buggier than the Okeefenokee Swamp. It's always been true that the same HTML file can look quite different on Netscape than it does on Explorer, but if you want to use some of the new competing "dynamic HTML" tags, you may literally have to design for both platforms. For now, a designer needs to keep the old 4.0 versions of both Navigator and Explorer. If you're really concerned about user compatibility, you may want to have some of the older versions, NCSA Mosaic and maybe even an AOL account. Stuff definitely works differently on AOL, even if you are using a Netscape browser. If you are using AOL, by the way, everything here at the WDJ is probably going to look all screwed up. We use only the latest and greatest, so if you don't have the latest browser, too bad. We check out our pages on the latest Netscape and Explorer and call it good. Go to our Download Page to download a bevy of browsers, if you wish.

Adobe Acrobat is not a Web browser, but an alternative way of delivering formatted material across platforms. It allows you to take a formatted document created in a word processor or page layout program, and convert it to Acrobat format. Anyone with the Acrobat Reader can then open the file and view it. All the original formatting is retained intact. Some Web sites choose to make certain information available in Acrobat format. The reader is free, so definitely add this to your toolbox. Click here to read our review of Adobe Acrobat.

If you plan to have graphics on your site, you'll need some graphic tools. Graphics for the Web need to be in either Gif 89 or jpeg format. They also usually need to be transparent (so the background shows through), and interlaced (so that they load gradually). Read our article on the subject to learn how to do it, and where to get the tools. There are several shareware utilities available for both PC and Mac that let you make transparent interlaced Gifs for the Web. Go to our Download Page and take your pick. LviewPro is a good one. If you do a lot with graphics, you should have a high-end package like Photoshop, but if all you need to do is crop, resize, and such, you can get by with a cheaper choice.

The non-Windows crowd may want to check out Image Alchemy, which converts over 75 image formats and is available for DOS, OS/2, SCO UNIX, and Mac.

Gif 89s can also be animated, and there are a few different shareware programs for creating animations. There they are on our Download Page.

Okay, you got your pages all dolled up and ready to go. You've viewed them on your system and made sure they look right. Now how do you upload them to your Web server? By using FTP (File Transfer Protocol). There are a variety of ways to do this, but an FTP client utility makes things very convenient. WS_FTP is a good one. WS_FTP shows your local files and your server side by side, and you just click to transfer files or directories in either direction.

For transferring files, FTP is the thing, but to run programs on the server, use Telnet. Telnet is built into Windows. Just go to "run" and type "telnet" and the name of the server. For loading up large files, it's handy to zip them up, upload them using FTP, then telnet into the server and unzip them.

And what is Zip, anyway? PkZip, or WinZip, is a very handy utility indeed. It allows you to compress one or more files into an "archive" which is much smaller than the original files. Many files are made available in zip format, so it's really a must-have item. Go and get it from our Download Page.

What else could you possibly need? My friend, there is a tidal wave of Web software products out there. You can get HTML validators to check your code for errors, although HomeSite includes one. Site Management packages help you find and fix broken links and other glitches on your site. Some form of site management is included in all of the "all-in-one" Web design tools mentioned above. Then there are frame design tools, Site Map creators, various text and graphics utilities...the list of neat little goodies goes on. HTML PowerTools is a suite that contains 8 HTML development tools. Whew! All of these and much more are on our Download Page, so trot on over there.

How about Audio? It's easy enough to insert background audio as a wave or MIDI file, using the EMBED tag (or, for Explorer only, BGSOUND), but it's pretty crude. If you do things this way, audio files take forever to download, and won't even work on a lot of people's systems. The way to go is streaming audio, which begins playing back as it downloads. RealAudio (from Progressive Networks, which has now introduced RealVideo) is the best-known of these deals, and the free RealAudio Player is a necessary item. To use RealAudio on your site, you'll probably have to pay your ISP a monthly fee. You can use it on a small scale using HTTP, but to be cool you need to buy the RealAudio server ($250 and up). RealAudio has a few competitors, including ActiveAudio and Streamworks.

Another hot multimedia technology is Macromedia's Shockwave (and now Flash). This allows you to convert multimedia "movies" created with Director to a format that can be displayed on the Web. Shockwave "movies" can include audio, animation, and interactive elements.

I wrote a primer on Web audio in Bruce's book HTML In Action (Microsoft Press, 1996). It's a little outdated now, but you should probably buy it anyway.

As with graphics, the more you do with audio, the more you will crave one or more higher-end editing packages. There's a raft of them, and all can record and play audio, as well as performing simple edits and some format conversions. Some programs, like Sound Forge, specialize in editing, while SAW Plus, Samplitude, and Digidesign's Session (PC) and Pro Tools (Mac), allow multitrack recording. Cakewalk, Voyetra's Digital Orchestrater Plus, and Cubase Audio combine multitrack audio with MIDI. Unfortunately, the audio world is still badly split between PC and Mac. Macheads can choose between Macromedia's Deck+Soundedit 16 package, and Digidesign's Pro Tools (which, however, only works with Digidesign hardware).

For lots more details about audio, check out The Tapeless Studio home page, her Software Reviews or Hardware Reviews, or our Web Audio Discussion Group.

Naturally, you'll be needing Java on your site. There are lots of shareware Java utilities out there, some of which let you create Java applets within a Windows-like interface, without knowing any programming. Jamba is a good one, as was AppletAce, which is no longer available. To check out all of our Java and Javascript material, go to The Java Bar.

If you have banner advertising on your site, you will need to have a way to keep track of impressions and clickthroughs (at the very least). The simplest way is with a CGI program. When the banner is clicked, it calls a CGI program which updates a log file, then links to the banner URL. We used to use such a home-brewed system here at the WDJ. It can also rotate banners, log impressions and clickthroughs, and generate automatic reports broken down by banner and by referring page. It was written by CGI guru Kief Morris.

Larger sites with more advertisers may want to consider an ad management system like AdJuggler. Ad Juggler and other such packages allow you to rotate banners throughout your site or on certain pages, specify certain dates and times, and generate various reports. Perhaps most importantly, they allow a specified number of each banner to be displayed within a specified time period, so you don't have to worry about over- or under-delivery.

For any commercial site, log analysis is very important. Your readers and advertisers want to know how many people look at your pages, where they come from, what browsers and OS they use, and what they like for breakfast. You can generate a detailed (but not very pretty) report by simply running a UNIX program called getstats on your server. However, if you're going to be sending reports to marketing types, you should look at one of the many analysis and reporting packages out there. They prepare nice pretty HTML pages with graphs, pie charts, and all the goodies. Marketwave Hit List is one of the best. To learn more about log analysis software, read Lisa Balbes' article on the subject.

Of course, there are millions of other software packages that you must have. You need ActiveX, video, VRML, push technology, and land knows what-all. If you can think of any essential or almost-essential items that we should add to this article, drop me a line at webmaster@WebDevelopersJournal.com.