Using Linux for Web Design
Submitted by miggols99 on 8 September, 2008 - 17:52
I enjoy doing web designing, and previously used Dreamweaver on Windows, but I rarely used the WYSIWYG feature of it. My favourite feature was the auto completing of the end HTML tags. When you did </ it would autocomplete it to </div> on any element if it was opened. Unfortunately I haven't been able to find a text editor on Linux that can do that..
EDIT: Added the FTP clients part.
Anyway, let's get on to...
The Initial Design
The GIMP seems to be the best raster graphics editor for Linux. If you like KDE, Krita is good, but personally I'm waiting for Krita 2.0 which will release soon. If you're used to using Illustrator or CorelDRAW, Inkscape will be more familiar to you 
WYSIWYG editors
If you're just someone who wants to make a very simple website, or have just started web design, it's ok to start with a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editor. I can recommend KompoZer for doing this.
Text editors (for hard coding)
If you've been doing web design for a while, you'll probably will have been using a text editor to create web pages. There are many text editors for Linux. If you're using GNOME, I recommend gedit (included in most GNOME distros) or Bluefish. If you're using KDE, I recommend KWrite (included in most KDE distros), Kate (also included in most KDE distros) or Quanta Plus. Quanta Plus is a mix between WYSIWYG and hard coding. It has buttons to help you put in images, forms and other HTML elements and features a preview pane to see if your website looks ok. Personally I like it the most out of the others. For the terminal users, Vim is also a good editor.
Icons
Icons. Icons are used a lot in making web pages. My favourite icon theme is Oxygen. It is used in KDE 4, and isn't overly glossy like some themes and is a lot more professional than KDE 3's theme. It's freely available and licensed under the Creative Common Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License or the GNU Lesser General Public License. There is also the Tango icon theme which is a lot more minimalistic than Oxygen. If you want to make your own I recommend using Inkscape as it uses SVG. Everyone knows SVG makes things easier with scaling 
FTP Client
You're going to need to get your website on the internet somehow. For this you will need an FTP client. My favourite one is FileZilla. It's very fast, and also available on Windows and Mac OS X. It has lots of different pane layouts, secure connections and can work well on any desktop environment or window manager. My only gripe with it is that it doesn't refresh folders if you add a file to it. You have to refresh it. This is only a minor annoyance though. Another one I like is a Firefox extension called FireFTP. It integrates very well with Firefox. You can simply press "Tools" then "FireFTP" to open a tab for it. It's quite simple, and looks good in Firefox.
Testing and debugging it
Obviously you can't make your website live without making sure there are no bugs or problems. My favourite way of debugging webpages is by using an extension for Firefox called Firebug. It makes everything a whole lot easier. You can also get Firebug to work in IE, Opera and Safari. See this page.
Comments
Vista styling
I like inkscape for my graphical needs though the interface can be annoying , the best feature is the editing of already made clip art , everyone seems to think you have to start from scratch to make a graphic , when you could just get almost free clip art fromplaces liike http://www.webpublication.org/FreePhotoshopGlassButtons/ and plain edit then to your liking, I did some really cool ones , and best of all , tyhe majority of the time you do not need to give any attribute for the art you just pinched ( sorry naughty I know). A lot of time you can improve on the original design , and have saved hours of work, or hours of staring at a blank screen trying to get ideas
Louise
Meh, i just use netbeans for
Meh, i just use netbeans for everything. outside of design work. for that inkscape, fireworks, photoshop, illustrator, whatever's handy.
I spent about 10 hours a day in front of a Mac. We all need a break from everything at some point.
Design Tools
Informative, I really needed something for icons. Now, I would also like to add something, I have been working with Microsoft .NET for web design and development, though it gives very impressive framework for development but still not very good for designing. So, the tool I have found to integrate with it is Microsoft's Expression web, it really gives you a lot of freedom and help. The latest technology WPF with .NET 3.5 is amazing change and can even give 3D impression to your design.
Design Tools
Informative, I really needed something for icons. Now, I would also like to add something, I have been working with Microsoft .NET for web design and development, though it gives very impressive framework for development but still not very good for designing. So, the tool I have found to integrate with it is Microsoft's Expression web, it really gives you a lot of freedom and help. The latest technology WPF with .NET 3.5 is amazing change and can even give 3D impression to your design.
Eclipse (and Aptana) are very
Eclipse (and Aptana) are very cool.
I've always used Linux for
I've always used Linux for Web Design. I think it works great.
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Can't find a text editor in linux?
If I remember correctly, in Quanta Plus when you type "<" the editor pops up a selection box with a list of all possible tags which when you select one of the tags it is entered into the editor like so "
" is automatically placed straight after.
I can't remember if this feature is enabled by default or whether you have to enable it in settings. Hope this helps.
Ken.
Sorry!
The HTML tags got rendered - oops!
The post should have read:
If I remember correctly, in Quanta Plus when you type < the editor pops up a selection box with a list of all possible tags which when you select one of the tags it is entered into the editor like so div the terminating tag /div (imagine angle brackets around these two div tags) is automatically placed straight after.
I can't remember if this feature is enabled by default or whether you have to enable it in settings. Hope this helps.
Ken.
Tkanks
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