Homeschool Spanish Lessons - Online Learning

After nearly 10 years of building and managing websites for myself and others, I can honestly say that it has never been easier. There is no reason for people to put up mediocre websites anymore – creating a lovely design does not require hiring a freelancer in India or forking over an arm and a leg for one in CA. For anybody just starting out who wants to begin blogging or develop a quick site for their business, here are 3 tools that are the best in their class.

  1- Artisteer Visual Web Designer

What an ingenious product. Never before have I seen a tool that allows you to design a website or template for Joomla, Wordpress, or Drupal in a visual manner. By visual, I mean that you select each part of the site – header, menu, articles, background, etc – and are offered a host of cool design options, with the result displayed instantly. They’ve built in all kinds of helpful color schemes, style suggestions, and images to help you decide.  While a veteran designer will still need Dreamweaver for additional customization, Artisteer is just plain awesome, and can be had for just $49 – although I’d recommend buying the $99 version.

  2. Windows Live Writer

It seems like lately Microsoft has tended to disappoint. Vista has had way too many glitches and incompatibilities, and even the new Outlook is not very good. I tried out Visio and uninstalled it that day, finding that Edraw Max can do the job way better and for a way lower price. But the free content writing/blogging tool Windows Live Writer is the best thing since sliced bread for writing anything from blog posts/articles to your homepage content. The image manipulations, XHTML compliance, cool plugins, and overall ease of use makes this tool fantastic.

3. Picnik Image Editing

This company is going to make a killing some day. Just look at the bios of the brainpower behind it and you can see why. These geniuses got together and put ample bank behind developing the easiest, most feature rich image editor I’ve seen online – and it’s totally free. This program was able to put an attractive border around a picture in a minute, which I had been struggling to make look good in Photoshop CS4. Sure it’s no Photoshop replacement, and you still need Irfanview as well, but being able to send an image to Picnik from Firefox makes it a breeze to use images you find while surfing. They’ve got some fun effects too, and WHAT an interface they’ve developed – that’s Flash at its finest, to be sure.