A lot of people ask me what tools I use to build websites, so I thought I’d share with you my basic arsenal of development applications and services that I find to be most useful. When starting a website from scratch, you need to find a domain name, register it, build a website, and then host that website somewhere. Here is a description of what I personally use to get the job done.

Because of its simplicity and ajaxification, I use instantdomainsearch.com when looking for a domain name. I use GoDaddy to register domains and manage DNS for no good reason other than I’m lazy to switch. So far, so good, and the prices are reasonable ($8.95/year per domain). As for hosting, I’ve used several good companies, yet not one is perfect. Dreamhost is the biggest bang for the buck ($7.95/month for shared hosting) while MMMultiworks offers great customer service for mission-critical Rails applications (~$300/month for a dedicated server). Network Solutions has horrible customer service but is technically reliable, Planet Argon is not bad for cheap Rails hosting, and Total Choice Hosting is a waste of your time.

To develop simple sites, I use the code editor in Adobe Dreamweaver. I rarely ever use the WYSIWYG editor, only because I like to have full control over the structure of the markup and CSS. For image processing I predominantly use Adobe Fireworks, but when working with graphic designers I tread water with Photoshop and Illustrator. Iconfactory’s xScope is absolutely indispensable when measuring, aligning and inspecting on-screen graphics and layouts. For all my FTP needs, I use Transmit. By the fact that I use xScope and Transmit, you can guess that my machine of choice is a MacBook Pro. I use Parallels Desktop for Mac extensively for platform testing in Windows, because as a web developer you can never underestimate the stupidity of Internet Explorer.

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