If you’re interested in learning website design, one of the main hurdles faced by most web designers is the traditionally high costs that come associated with professional design software.
Although Adobe’s fantastic suite of design software is regarded as some of the best in the web design industry, it’s simply an unaffordable option for most beginners, the standard CS 4 package costs around £1000 alone.
Thankfully, there are a number of open-source alternatives available that can be downloaded and used for free, serving as a perfect starter dish for any budding web designer or for those on a budget.
GIMP – Web Design Software
http://www.gimp.org/ (Windows)
http://gimp.lisanet.de/ (Mac)
GIMP has built a well-deserved reputation for being the free ‘Photoshop Alternative’ – coming with everything that you’d expect in professional design software from image manipulation tools to filters and typography editing.
Aptana – Web Development & Authoring
http://www.aptana.org/ (Windows & Mac)
Aptana is simply open-source web authoring for both Windows and Mac at it’s finest. Essentially a free solution to Dreamweaver, Aptana comes complete with CSS, HTML and Javascript editing environments and reference guides.
Filezilla/Cyberduck – FTP Web Software
http://filezilla-project.org/ (Windows)
http://cyberduck.ch/ (Mac)
If you’re looking for a more manual approach to file transferring, as opposed to using in-built ‘site managers’, we think both Filezilla for Windows and Cyberduck for Mac are some of the best free FTP programs available online.
OpenOffice – Content Writing
http://www.openoffice.org/ (Windows & Mac)
OpenOffice is a very popular suite of free content writing, spreadsheet and presentation creation tools that are very much on-par with the golden king of processing applications, Microsoft Office. It’s the perfect open-source fit for professionally creating draft website copy or client proposals.
Further Resources
Next week, I’ll be looking into some of the best open-source Web Applications including CMS, Blogging & E-Commerce platforms. In the meantime, watch our recent web design video blog on CSS3 Text Shadows.
Downloading Aptana now. Software costs are already high enough for a ‘small’ agency. Netbeans was also a option but the ftp support ist okey.
Downloading GIMP for Windows. Hopefully it will help my project. Thanks.
I have been using Open Source Software for over 2 years and have generated a complete portfolio with them. GIMP, Inkscape and I will look at the Dreamweaver alternative and the set will be complete. I have actually found that using GIMP over Photoshop for branding and flyer design has produced better results. Thanks for sharing- regards, OpenSource Junky!
My new website isn’t up yet…I’m new to this, although I took an HTML class a few years ago. THANK YOU for the downloads and information. I will be back to this site soon! GirlGeek123
I prefer paint.net with lots of extensions as an alternative to photoshop.
I’m downloading aptana right now.
Thx for the info.
This is put me on the right path. Thanks