by Don Herion

If I went about creating my dream Web studio these are the first three programs I would choose. Each is considered the best in its specific area. Dreamweaver is probably the premiere Web editor program on the market. It is powerful, stable and relatively easy to use. Most artists, including yours truly, consider Adobe Photoshop to be the best image-editing program available. Macromedia Flash is the most popular multimedia animation tool with the ability to reach 90 percent of Web users. If you have these programs you have all the horsepower necessary to create a 'kick a##' Web site. But $1,100 is a major expenditure, not one many people can afford. It is also a major reason why many people find the task of creating their own Web site so daunting. Many people believe they have to spend a fortune to make their Web site dream come true. But do they?

A Peaceful Sunday Afternoon
Trying to recover after my Chicago Bears lost, plunging to 0 - 4 for the season I decided to comb the Internet for Web design tools anyone on a modest budget could afford. I set my maximum budget at $100. A nice round number. Before beginning my quest I drew up a list of programs any web designer would need to create and maintain a Web site. Here is what I came up with.

HTML editor
Image editor
Animation program
FTP client (if my html editor did not have this capability)

A $50 CoffeeCup
Obviously the most important requirement on my list is a HTML editor. There were a number of capable programs including GlobalScape CuteHTML ($20), dotCool Builder ($30) and Web-O-Rama ($20 donation). Each had its pluses and minuses. But the one I chose was CoffeeCup HTML. Version 8.5 is a deep and stable program that includes Expresso FTP for uploading your site (thus eliminating my need for an Ftp program). Among its powerful feature set is a split view page preview that allows you to view your code in one window and render it in another. You can also edit your tag colors for improved editing, view your html in a tag treeview, and build tables with a WYSIWYG table designer. In addition, CoffeeCup comes with a spell check, a 30,000-word thesaurus, and an image companion that allows you to scale, rotate and convert images into various formats. As if that were not enough they also throw in 3000 free Web graphics, icons, .gif animations and photos courtesy of Corel, 100 free java scripts and the ability to edit .asp, .php, .xml and more. The price of this amazing little program - $50. A steal in my opinion. (www.coffeecup.com)

Photoshop for Free?
With my remaining budget slashed in half I knew I would be hard pressed to find a decent image-editing program and still leave some money for an animation program. But I got lucky with the discovery of 'The Gimp' (GNU Image Manipulation Program). 'The Gimp' is an amazing program. Originally created for the Linux OS it has since been ported to Windows. Its list of capabilities rival those found in Photoshop and similar programs. You get a full suite of tools like brush, pencil, airbrush and clone. The program supports layers and channels as well as multiple Undo/Redo. It also supports all the standard image formats, including .gif, .jpg, .png and more. In addition to the filter effects available within the program, over a hundred additional plug-ins have been written by outside programmers. There are many more features as well and you can read all about them at their Web site (the links to all of my picks are listed below). And best of all 'The Gimp' is free. That's what I said - FREE. You can't do any better than that.

A Flash sWish
With my two main programs taken care of I still had $50 to play with. I am a big lover of 'Flash' style animations but that program was beyond my limited budget. But I found an excellent alternative in Swish 1.51. Swish is a powerful little animation program that allows designers to create shockwave animations independent of Flash. Although not nearly as powerful, its text animation capabilities are truly exceptional. Click here to read my review. At $30 you can't possibly go wrong.

A Hot Bonus Tool
Not content to have only one animation program I discovered another little gem called 'IBM HotMedia 3.0.' HotMedia is a rich media tool that allows you to add interactive multimedia such as video, streaming synchronized audio, 3D, animations and more to your Web site using Java based technology. This means as long as your visitors have a Java-enabled browser, they will not require a plug-in. Best of all this authoring tool is free. Fantastic. Who needs Flash?

My $98 Web Studio
I check my budget again and see I still have $20 left. What can I do with $20? Since I had zero experience with 'The Gimp' I decided to find a good how-to book on it. Checking Amazon I found several possibilities. Determined to stay in budget I decided on 'Sams - Teach Yourself Gimp in 24 Hours' for $19.99. I found the book locally at a small discount for $18. That left me with $2. There's not much you can do with $2 these days so I changed the name for my article to - Build Your Web Design Studio for $98. You see you really don't need to spend a fortune to build a Web site.