5 Platforms a newbee (or pro) Designer should use to develop sites!
Designers love creating things. And especially web artists are found marveling at designs and interfaces. But how can these newbee designers potentially develop sites along with designing them.
BTW designers can check out the Jacob Cass’s $11,000 Writing Project here. We are one of the sponsors!
A lot of designers are confused with all the options available today in the web world. Different projects have different requirement, based on the requirement the designer can choose the following.
1. Simple Corporate/Personal Sites:
This is the first level of sites that you design and build. Usually 5-7 pager site. To keep it simple do regular htmls and apply design. No complex things to do. Nothing to worry here.
Best use: Text Editors/DreamWeaver/CSS editor. Tutorials here, here and here.
2. Medium Sized Websites ( 10+ pages )
If requirement is more than 10 pages go for a CMS. A Content Management System is very much recommended. There are tons of CMS systems available. Pick the simplest. Drupal is great and simple. For more functionality and feature set you can give Joomla a try. It has a much improved documentation and support now. Another brilliant CMS is Expression Engine. Elegant but is a paid CMS.
3. For Blog Designs
For blog designs I strongly recommend Wordpress. The number of plugins/features and support it offers, it simply beats the nearest competitor flat out. Designing a theme for wordpress may require you to know a bit about its architecture. Other options could be Typepad & Movabletype.
4. For E-Commerce Portals.
Gone are the days of OSCommerce and dull looking commerce sites. Move to Magento or Shopify today. They are the slickest open source paltforms available for e-commerce today. Magento has a huge feature list and is ver very exhaustive. Shopify is simple and smaller carts can easily do with it.
5. For Web Apps and Big Portals
This is the last leg of development you can get into. Use a php framework if you need to build a site that has n number of pages and serves 1000’s or millions of users. CakePHP, CodeIgnitor and Symphony rock. Stick to any one of these. You will need to hone your coding and php skills before you even think of jumping into these platforms. You can find a comparison here
These are some very best of the web solutions. A lot more are available for enterprises, crm’s or custom applications. Will share more in the coming posts.
Stay tuned!
8 & 1/2 Free Appz I can’t Live Without
My laptop is my best bud! Designing @ NetBramha, I spend most of my time on my laptop. I aslo use it for listening to music, gaming, managing my iPod, catching up with my friends around the world and lots more…In fact I can confess that i am addicted to my Laptop, and these 8 & 1/2 applications makes it even more irresistible… Well these are some of the applications I can’t live without
1.Launchy:
I rarely touch mouse while navigating in Windows. Thanks to the Lauchy Opensource Keystroke launcher. With this you can rapidly do tasks like launching applications, running scripts, use as a calculator, … many more can be added by adding more plugins.
2. Digsby:
Gtalk + Yahoo… + LinkedIn + twitter I’m happy to have everything in a single App.
I know this came very recently and I lived through the age before that. But since I came across this superb piece of software, I can’t live without it anymore! 
3. muCommander:
A good replacement to the famous Total Commander which was unfortunately a paid software. muCommander is a lightweight cross-platform file manager, with features like support of FTP, SFTP….. Full keyboard access, in-built support for Archive files like ZIP, RAR, GZIP….. & many many more.
4. Firebug:
Its an addon to the Firefox. Just a keystroke away, with this you can inspect and edit live HTML pages, tweak CSS to perfection, debug JavaScript, monitor Network activity and the list goes on. A must tool for a web developer.
http://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1843
5. Kuler:
A great place to get color inspirations and even a great place to store your own color palettes privately or publicly. You can make color palettes from a base color or from a image(This feature I LOVE VERY MUCH!).
6. Gvim
I know there are hundreds of editors out there. But I some how got stuck on this brilliant editor!!!!
Vim is a highly configurable text editor built to enable efficient text editing. Vim is often called a “programmer’s editor,” and so useful for programming that many consider it an entire IDE. It’s not just for programmers, though. Vim is perfect for all kinds of text editing, from composing email to editing and configuration of files. (Source: About @ Vim.org )
7. Cygwin
Earlier I really missed the commands like ls, Grep, diff, sed…. in Windows. but with Cygwin you can get all those super duper commands and other Unix tools in Windows. In windows it is very difficult to do tasks like cleaning up. svn folders from a project before deploying to production server. With Cygwin you can do this with just one line of code 
8 & 1/2. Dropbox
It’s a simple online file sharing/synchronizing app packed with features like automatic syncing, upload when internet is inactive,… and other cool features. With the free account you can share up to 2GB of data.
uTorrent, puTTy, Filezilla, Kmplayer… are again cool & useful free tools which I use everyday. But are replacable and I can handle my life with out them. 
So that was a small list of must have’s.