Open Source Web Design [design]

Designing website’s is a hobby of mine, but like many other hobbyists I don’t want to pay excessive amounts of money for the top notch design software. Therefore I turn to the open source market to find our alternatives. While some of the Open Source products have great features but lack the testing/UI. Others have been round for years and are real competitors to Adobe/Microsoft. I don’t have a Mac, so this would be focusing more on the Windows/Linux platform, but please suggest open source Mac alternatives.

While some of this software is not technically open source, they are all free to use.

Graphics

GIMP (Linux/Windows/Mac)
The GIMP is probably one of the best known and longest running open source graphical editors. It comprises of a very feature rich editor which rivals Adobes Photoshop. This is all backed by a very active community who create 1000’s of plugin’s. GIMP has to be may favourite editor. It is great for small icons, drawing at a pixel level, and even for larger drawings. However the user interface of GIMP has a lot to be desired. It is made up of a number of windows instead of one uniformed program (this is solved in GIMP 2.5).

GIMP (windows)

Warning mac support is achieved through a series of third party developers. Please see the Macintosh GIMP homepage for details.

Paint.net (Windows)
Paint.net is another tool like GIMP which contains extremely powerful image editing abilities. It is more commonly used to edit existing photos, however is does contain simple tools to create new shapes.

 
Paint.Net

Seashore (Mac)
Seashore is basically a simple/cut down version of GIMP for the Mac, I don’t have a mac so I can’t comment on how good (or not so good) Seashore is. This is for you if you don’t need all the advanced plugin’s associated with GIMP, but want the basic image editing tools.

Seashore

Inkscape (Linux/Mac/Windows)
Inkscape is currently the best open source vector illustration package. It has fantastic potential however is prone to bugs - it crashed 4 times while I was testing it. It features all the standard vector editing tools it has quite a steep learning curve though, especially if you are coming from illustrator. However it has download packages for all 3 major OS’s, and could be more stable on one of these.

Inkscape

N.B. If you like ubuntu, take a look at ubuntu studio which comes preloaded with inkscape and GIMP.

CSS/HTML

After we have created our design we need to code it up into HTML and CSS, here are some of the best open source / free editors I could find.

Bluefish (Linux/Windows*)
Bluefish is a very powerful open source website editor with built in syntax highlighting for HTML and CSS as well as a number of other languages. It has a very nice user interface with big buttons to easily get you around. It also support the use of programs which can handle a lot of simultaneous run files.

*Windows support is achieved through Cygwin.

NVU (Linux/Windows/Mac)
NVU is the most famous open source website editor. However is has ceased development since 2005, and has been replaced with an unofficial bug fix release called KompoZer. KompoZer is a WYSIWYG editor, with a complete feature set.

After thoughts

Don’t forget about using a text editor for simple HTML/CSS editing there are a number available including Notepad++ and Notepad2.