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Well.. having now spent the best part of the last 3 months of my life building web sites (Fitz, CG9, tidying up 36RAC and WrightSite, and recently starting to work on the new BNS site and concurrently re-building the Fitz Intranet) here’s the short list of (free) tools you should not be without, in my opinion, if you are constructing web sites:

• Chris Pederick‘s Web developer toolbar for Firefox (indispensible for sorting out any type of weirdness you experience when something doesn’t render in the browser the way you expect)
• Alex Sirota‘s ColorZilla for Firefox (indispensible for nicking [picking] colours off websites you like or just doing matches, deltas, zooms etc)
• Microsoft’s Developer Toolbar for IE (as per Web developer toolbar for Firefox).. and, of course, it’s like all MS software (beta or sold) – it’s average and prone to the obvious blow-ups etc.. ce la vie..
• Eamonn Coleman’s Pixvue – if you are managing photos sets (galleries, metadata etc) and want max flexibility in using XML/XSLT to create custom web photo albums – this is the tool.
• Ultimate Paint – if you can’t afford (or, in my case, sometimes just can’t ‘get on’ with Photoshop) this is a good, free, alternative – If you have any experience with Deluxe Paint from the way-back Amiga days then you’ll feel pretty at home..
• html-kit‘s online favicon generator (chuck it a picture and your favicons come out)
• and, of course, Dreamweaver (or your flavour of site editor) – because even if you are working with a content delivery framework, like phpSiteFramework, the site management, ftp, editing, and other tools, these suites provide still just ‘help’…
• and, of course, PSPad (or your flavour of advanced text editor). PSPad ‘understands’ html, css and php so it’s very useful for that (and a raft of other things).. you might want to find a V4.33 copy as I have had some troubles with the the latest vesion (v4.51) on XP..

If you are not CSS ‘savvy’ yet – learn it – it will save you a life-time of boring-ness – no more tweaking individual pages – tweak the style sheet and the whole site is done. That being said you will also learn to hate Internet Explorer with a passion (if you don’t already) once you get heavily in CSS. The bottom line, however, is currently, somewhere between 70-90% of your users are IE users so your CSS stuff must work in IE (and equally as well in Firefox..).

Further to this, don’t re-invent the wheel – your’e connected to the internet – use it- somebody has already done what you are trying to do in CSS and one of the best ways to learn is lifting ideas out of stylesheets on sites, or for features, you see elsewhere and like.. or the multitude of tutorial material that folks have helpfully offered to the world..