This reference is meant to give the budding Web designer an idea of the various tools that are used for creating Web pages and graphics for the Internet. They are available from various sources, and some you can even download off the Internet for free.
Below you will find the tools that serious Web developers use to create graphics and build Web pages. The cost of these packages will most likely prevent the average user from obtaining some of them (well, legally anyway) as they are not cheap. But, if you want the ability to create professional-looking graphics, this is the stuff to get.
For years Photoshop has been regarded as the industry standard among graphics professionals for color correcting and image manipulation. With added support for third-party plug-ins, the creative capabilities of this program have been greatly expanded.
One of the many things that's not only very useful but free off the Internet is the GIF 89a plug-in for Photoshop. This excellent little utility lets you create transparent GIFs within Photoshop. What sets this apart from any other program is that unlike the rest, you can select more than one color to be made transparent. It's available from the Adobe site at http://www.adobe.com.
Animated GIFs are quickly becoming the standard way to add basic animation due to the native support for the file format by many browsers. GIF Construction Set gives the user the ability to build basic and complicated animated GIFs from many different file formats.
Excelling in graphics for print media, xRes can also export your images as GIF89a files as well as progressive JPEGs and PNGs.
A suite of plug-in filters for Photoshop, The Black Box contains 10 filters that allow you to create bevels, drop shadows, and 3-D effects quickly and easily. Each filter can be user customized.
Files created using the Acrobat PDF Writer retain the original look of the document over multiple platforms, ensuring that your message is delivered as intended. Acrobat Readers are available for Mac, DOS, Windows, and UNIX.
If you don't already own Director and are planning on purchasing it, this is the package to get. Bundled with Director is xRes, an image manipulation program; SoundEdit 16, a sound manipulation program; and Extreme 3D, an application that allows you to create 3-D scenes and animations.
If you are confronted with the task of getting information from a stack of printed material typed into a Web page, OmniPage can help. This powerful OCR accurately and easily converts scanned documents into editable text that can be imported or opened in your favorite HTML editor.
This powerful, professional Web page builder supports not only the new HTML 3.2 spec, but has added support for Netscape Extension as well as Internet Explorer Extensions.
Included in its feature list is a built-in image map editor for client-side, server-side image maps, and a built-in frames editor, along with a built-in color selector that relieves the user of converting RGB to HEX.
Once your Web site is complete, you may want to run Web Analyzer on it to be sure that all your links, from hyperlinks to embedded multimedia files, are linked up correctly. This program searches through a site and shows you a graphical representation of the structure, including all in-and-out links as well as all file types, sizes, titles, and dates as they were last modified. Once a problem is found, you can launch your favorite HTML editor to take care of the problem from within Web Analyzer.