To create and maintain a Web site, you need:  

• Editing software to create your HTML pages, as well as graphic and possibly audio editing packages. 
• Browsers to preview your work. 
• FTP and Telnet to communicate with your Web server. 
• If you're running ads, ad management and log analysis systems. 
• Lots of other handy little goodies. 

The first piece of the puzzle is a good word processor. HTML can simply be typed in by hand in any word processor and saved as an HTML file. Of course, it's much easier to generate HTML with a proper HTML editor, but a powerful word processor is essential for the pre-HTML stage. As an editor, I need the most powerful character-crunching machine I can get. When you receive articles from a variety of different writers, there are some cleaning chores to do, to say the least. A better analogy might be fumigation! If I only had a dollar for every spurious apostrophe or split infinitive I have expunged from the work of so-called professional writers….  

Sorry. Back to our topic. Whatever kind of a Web site you're running, you'll be doing various text editing tasks that will go much faster if you have a powerful word processor and learn how to use it. In fact, it's awful handy to have…dare I say it? An office suite. Yes, I use Office 97, and for the most part I find it excellent. I use it to clean up and spell-check articles that I receive, then export the text to my HTML editor. You can even create a document in Word and save it as HTML. Few users would want to create a finished page this way, but it certainly can be handy. If you don't care for Microsoft stuff, check out the new Corel suite. They've put together a contender that includes WordPerfect, Quattro Pro, and of course a database.  

Now to create some HTML. There are lots of cheap shareware HTML editors out there, including FlexEd, Hotdog, HotMeTaL, Nachos, and more. We're kind of partial to Homesite. For the Mac, there's World Wide Web Weaver. These all work a little differently, but basically what you get is a word processor with shortcut icons for the HTML tags. They allow varying degrees of customization.  

Another essential tool is a search-and-replace utility. If the boss wants to change some little detail that appears on lots of pages, are you going to go through and re-code each one? No sir. You are going to do a search-and-replace over multiple files. There are a couple of shareware utilities out there that work fine. A good one is called simply "Search-and-Replace," and is made by Funduc Software. Click here to grab it. One of the things we like about HomeSite is that it includes a search-and-replace function.  

Adobe Acrobat is not a Web browser, but an alternative way of delivering formatted material across platforms. It allows you to take a formatted document created in a word processor or page layout program, and convert it to Acrobat format. Anyone with the Acrobat Reader can then open the file and view it. All the original formatting is retained intact. Some Web sites choose to make certain information available in Acrobat format. The reader is free, so definitely add this to your toolbox.  

If you plan to have graphics on your site, you'll need some graphic tools. Graphics for the Web need to be in either Gif 89 or jpeg format. They also usually need to be transparent (so the background shows through), and interlaced (so that they load gradually). There are several shareware utilities available for both PC and Mac that let you make transparent interlaced Gifs for the Web. LviewPro is a good one. If you do a lot with graphics, you should have a high-end package like Photoshop, but if all you need to do is crop, resize, and such, you can get by with a cheaper choice.  

The non-Windows crowd may want to check out Image Alchemy, which converts over 75 image formats and is available for DOS, OS/2, SCO UNIX, and Mac.  

Gif 89s can also be animated, and there are a few different shareware programs for creating animations.  

Okay, you got your pages all dolled up and ready to go. You've viewed them on your system and made sure they look right. Now how do you upload them to your Web server? By using FTP (File Transfer Protocol). There are a variety of ways to do this, but an FTP client utility makes things very convenient. WS_FTP is a good one. A free "LE" version can be had by clicking here. WS_FTP shows your local files and your server side by side, and you just click to transfer files or directories in either direction.  

For transferring files, FTP is the thing, but to run programs on the server, use Telnet. Telnet is built into Win 95. Just go to "run" and type "telnet" and the name of the server. For loading up large files, it's handy to zip them up, upload them using FTP, then telnet into the server and unzip them.  

And what is Zip, anyway? PkZip, or WinZip, is a very handy utility indeed. It allows you to compress one or more files into an "archive" which is much smaller than the original files. Many files are made available in zip format, so it's really a must-have item.  

What else could you possibly need? My friend, there is a tidal wave of Web software products out there. You can get HTML validators to check your code for errors. Site Management packages like Astra allow you to find and fix broken links and other glitches on your site. FrameTool is a WYSIWYG frame design tool, HTML Tree Control allows Web designers to create nice site maps, TransIT! generates HTML tags for multicolored text…the list of neat little goodies goes on. HTML PowerTools is a suite that contains 8 HTML development tools. Whew! 

How about Audio? It's easy enough to insert background audio as a wave or MIDI file, using the BGSOUND tag, but it's pretty crude. If you do things this way, audio files take forever to download, and won't even work on a lot of people's systems. The way to go is streaming audio, which begins playing back as it downloads. RealAudio (from Progressive Networks, which has now introduced RealVideo) is the best-known of these deals, and the free RealAudio Player is a necessary item. To use RealAudio on your site, you'll probably have to pay your ISP a monthly fee. You can use it on a small scale using HTTP, but to be cool you need to buy the RealAudio server ($250 and up). RealAudio has a few competitors, including ActiveAudio and Streamworks.  

Another hot multimedia technology is Macromedia's Shockwave. This allows you to convert multimedia "movies" created with Director to a format that can be displayed on the Web. Shockwave "movies" can include audio, animation, and interactive elements.  

As with graphics, the more you do with audio, the more you will crave one or more higher-end editing packages. There's a raft of them, and all can record and play audio, as well as performing simple edits and some format conversions. Some programs, like Sound Forge, specialize in editing, while SAW Plus, Samplitude, and Digidesign's Session (PC) and Pro Tools (Mac), allow multitrack recording. Cakewalk, Voyetra's Digital Orchestrater Plus, and Cubase Audio combine multitrack audio with MIDI. Unfortunately, the audio world is still badly split between PC and Mac. Macheads can choose between Macromedia's Deck+Soundedit 16 package, and Digidesign's Pro Tools (which, however, only works with Digidesign hardware).  

Naturally, you'll be needing Java on your site. There are lots of shareware Java utilities out there, some of which let you create Java applets within a Windows-like interface, without knowing any programming. Jamba and AppletAce are a couple of good 'uns.  

If you have banner advertising on your site, you will need to have a way to keep track of impressions and clickthroughs (at the very least). The simplest way is with a CGI program. When the banner is clicked, it calls a CGI program which updates a log file, then links to the banner URL. It can also rotate banners, log impressions and clickthroughs, and generate automatic reports broken down by banner and by referring page.   

Larger sites with more advertisers may want to consider an ad management package like AdJuggler, Accipiter or Clickwise. These allow you to rotate banners throughout your site or on certain pages, specify certain dates and times, and generate various reports. Perhaps most importantly, they allow a specified number of each banner to be displayed within a specified time period, so you don't have to worry about over- or under-delivery.  

For any commercial site, log analysis is very important. Your readers and advertisers want to know how many people look at your pages, where they come from, what browsers and OS they use, and what they like for breakfast. You can generate a detailed (but not very pretty) report by simply running a UNIX program called getstats on your server. However, if you're going to be sending reports to marketing types, you should look at one of the many analysis and reporting packages out there. They prepare nice pretty HTML pages with graphs, pie charts, and all the goodies. Marketwave Hit List is one of the popular ones. 

Of course, there are millions of other software packages that you must have. You need ActiveX, video, VRML, push technology, and land knows what-all. If you can think of any essential or almost-essential items that we should ad to this article, drop me a line at webmaster@cyberadsstudio.com