With almost everything happening online, having a website is becoming about as common as being on any of the many social media platforms currently available. Your website is the face of your business to, literally, the entire world, through which potential clients find out about you and decide whether they would like to do  business with you or not.

DIY or Hire?

As such, designing your website is about as important as manufacturing your products or developing your service. Depending on how much you have, you may decide to use a software voucher to get software for building your own website or hire a professional to develop it. Either way, there are certain software applications that come highly recommended.

First the Freeware

There are many software applications that can be downloaded for free to help you design your website but we’ll just look at a few:

Notepad++

This is particularly popular with web developers because it can support several programming languages, and can be used either for backend web development or to build full software applications.

FileZilla

This is quite popular among Windows XP/Vista/7 users among the open source FTP programs available. The software has the expected basic features and is absolutely free to use. You can even store some custom FTP settings for yourwebsite in order to get quick connections.

NetBeans

This software is available for Windows, Mac and Linux and supports several syntaxes along with third party Java, C++ or PHP frameworks. Another advantages is that is supports many foreign languages so it can be used globally.

And there’s more…

Depending on what you would like to do exactly, there are many more options you could consider beyond the freeware above. For instance, if you are thinking about debugging there are two tools that come highly recommended including:

Firebug

This is an add-on within the Mozilla Firefox browser. It comes handy when debugging and editing CSS, JavaScript, HTML and even XHR in any website that you may have.

YSlow

This one was developed by Yahoo to enhance the performance of your website by targeting the exact area of your website that needs enhancing. It is also available on other browsers like Chrome and Safari.

A popular requirement for websites nowadays is that they should be able to be viewed on various devices. This is called responsive design and there are certain frameworks that can help you with that. Two of the best include:

Bootstrap

This is by far the most popular responsive design framework. Developed by Twitter it is designed to help you develop a website with a quick start and a great look.

Foundation Framework

This one is a quick prototyping tool so it is really good when you are just starting to design your website. It has a flexible layout for its grid that can scale out to whatever size you would like so you can get a feel of what the final product will look like.

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