List of free programs useful for website design

Many ministries and churches design and maintain their own websites, mostly due to cost restrictions. As such, it can be difficult in finding useful tools, and oftentimes, people resort to using pirated software to do the job.

Obviously this is an ethical problem, especially in regards to churches and ministries. While no one may know you used a pirate version of photoshop to create that brilliant page header, or that you used your ripped copy of dreamweaver to create your beautiful web page, God does.

I have compiled a short list of useful tools that are absolutely free (and guilt free!) to use, that are equivelent to commercial products.

Graphics - GNU Image Manipulation Tool
Commonly abbreviated to G-IMP or even GIMP, this is a graphics program that is absolutely free, but with the power of photoshop. Unfortunately, it is not for the faint of heart. Like photoshop, it has a steep learning curve, but anyone familiar with graphics editors in general can probably figure it out quite quickly.


Download it here - http://www.gimp.org/

Alternatives - For a simpler graphics program, which still has features like layers and filters, you can try http://www.getpaint.net

Website Editing - KompoZer
Not every pastor is a whiz with HTML or CSS. Bible college doesn't tend to teach you much about divs and spans and tags. So most pastors either get someone in their congregation to create their website, or do it themselves.

While KompoZer is not a one click website creator, it is comparable to dreamweaver in terms of features. It can do almost everything dreamweaver does (and the features it doesn't have, most churches won't miss), and once again, it's free.


Download it here - http://kompozer.net/download.php (most people will want the windows binary)

FTP Access - Filezilla
So, you have your website, it looks good, and it works. But it's on your computer. No one but you can see it. How do you get it online?

Well, first of all you need a host. There are many online webhosts around, and some are fairly priced. For a church website, especially a small local church, I wouldn't pay more than $8 a month for webhosting. Any webhost that tries to offer you all this fancy stuff like secure hosting, and a bunch of other stuff is just trying to get your money. More than likely, unless your church also runs a store, you won't need anything fancy to run your site. A domain name and a host.

Your domain name is the name people type to get to the website. For example "www.baptistbiblebelieverschurch.com".

The host is where the files are stored.

To get your files uploaded to the host, so people can visit, there are several ways to do it. Some hosts provide a way to upload files online, but by and by, it is easier to use an ftp program. Which is where FileZilla comes in.

You may need a bit of technical understanding to use FileZilla, but in general, all you need to know is

1. Your host name (usually the same as your domain name, sometimes with ftp in front of it instead of www)
2. Your username you got when you signed up
3. Your password you got when you signed up
4. The port number (usually 21, but your host should tell you)

You can put this information into FileZilla, click connect, and be able to quickly upload all your files.



Download it here

http://filezilla-project.org/