What are the best Free tools you use for website design?

I use Kompozer for HTML.

 

I like to use:

Netbeans (IDE)
XAMPP (testing server)
Filezilla (FTP client)

aside from that, I don't use much other freeware

 

If you do not want to spend the bucks for photoshop, you can use Paint.net for free, and it is pretty good.

 

weebly is a very easier website making tools. Try today.

 

Aptana, Zend, Eclipse
Notepad++ is almost as effective as the ones above, but uses less resources. It also has file transfer plugins, so it can easily replace a standalone FTP application.
Fillezilla is one of the best complete win apps for file transfer
Macromedia Fireworks and Photoshop for design and graphical alterations.
Firebug

 

Well, I am not much of a web designer, but for composing web pages I have always used the Text Editor of HTML-Kit for writing HTML, CSS, PHP, RDF, XML, et al; the current iterations of all graphical browsers (MSIE, FireFox, Opera, Safari, Chrome, et al) plus Lynx textual browser for checking output; and Irfanview for manipulating images. And always use the W3C HTML/CSS Validators to check your coding. Added: learn to code HTML and CSS by hand in order to master these essential foundation languages.
James

 

Developing application for almost 10 years. I use a lot of tools. Right now I remember these.

1. Versioning: Git, Subersion, Mercurial,
2. IDE: eclipse PDT, eclipse CDT, netbeans, KDevelop, vim,
3. Debugger: valgrind, kcachegrind, gdb, firebug, chrome dev tools, xdebug
4. Documentation: doxygen, phpdoc
5. Virtualization: vmware, virtual box
6. Testing: jmeter, autoit, phpunit
7. Performance: MS Visual Studio profiler, jprofiler, gprof
8. Issue tracker: Jira, MantisBT
9. Build system: ant, make

And also, lot of unix tools.

 

Word press is the best tool for Web site Design...

 

For graphics designing i use photoshop.
For web designing i use dreamweaver.
For cms i use wordpress.

 

Mostly OpenSource and freeware products.
For coding html, css, php, javascript I use NetBeans IDE + Notepad++ text editor and may be sometimes DreamWeaver in trial, but believe me DreamWeaver it is not better than NetBeans for php and other web coding...
For Web, Graphic, Video and other types of design I use Gimp, Pitivi and Adobe products in trial mode. Personally I own only Photoshop elements, no money for other stuff...
Transfer and console, shell etc. I use FileZilla, putty and Tunelier(BitVise) which is very useful and nice program also freeware

 

DW8.0 is the best web design tools

 

dreamweaver ,photoshop

 

Let's don't forget about BlueFish and mozilla's KomPozer these two editors are very useful sometimes.
It is too bad but I have to say it, there is no alternative to the adobe products for video editing, even sony vegas is not good as Adobe Aftereffect is.
Personally in Linux I use Pitivi and it is good, but not so good to be full alternative to AAE

 

Laughing at the wordpress replies -- the question was website design, NOT crapping out some "blog in drag" with off the shelf parts, inaccessible bloated markup, and execution time wasting insecure idiotic codebase... filled with such stupidities as putting the mysql hostname, username and password into DEFINE's, and throwing endless pointless classes at EVERYTHING for no good reason.

As to the actual topic of free tools:

Editor -- Flo's Notepad 2. Full featured since it's built with scintilla, and unlike most other editors it lets me turn off all the annoying crap that just gets in the way of my coding like tabs (since I like to put editor windows side-by-side across multiple displays), the space wasting toolbars (since I know the keyboard shortcuts and how to use a *SHOCK* menu), color syntax highlighting (since I still can't grasp how anyone finds that eye-blurring illegible acid trip 'useful')... while providing useful tools like long line indicators, indented word-wraps with indicators, tab alignment bars, etc, etc...

Had a fun argument with someone recently about it... they were all "But it's not been updated since may 2011, it's not up to date!" -- It doesn't need updates, it does everything I need in an editor and is rock solid stable. Only buggy rubbish poorly coded unstable constantly crashing software needs updates every week or more. (yes, firefox, I'm looking at you)

Paint Program -- I actually suck it up and pay for one, Corel Paint Shop Pro. The newest version is nice when you need Photoshop style functionality, but I still use the old version 7 from over a decade ago because it still works, and is far far faster loading, faster running, and just plain leaner than anything recent. A nice second place would be the GIMP. Up until recently I laughed at it, as it was not really all that useful. Lately it's made massive strides towards becoming a legitimate tool. It's even finally caught up to and possibly even passed PSP7 when it comes to saving properly optimized images... in that way the free and cheap tools actually blow Adobe products out of the water, since Adobe wouldn't know file optimization from the hole in the center of their product DVD's. Of course, I only go to the goofy paint program at the END of the design cycle, since I start with semantic markup of my content, create my layouts (yes, plural) with CSS, and THEN make the graphics to hang on it.

I'll also agree XAMPP is great for local testing, and I use Oracle VirtualBox to run Linux, Lion and XP under win7, so I have realtime access to all three of those without 'reboots' or extra hardware. (unless you count the 16 gigs of RAM I have in this i7 870, the 27" IPS center and two 24" LCD's in the wings).

... and... apart from every browser I can install in those VM's and locally, that's 99% of my development tools. To be honest, 90% of my time developing is spent in the flat text editor.

 

The easies way is to use a ready Blog or CMS system like Joomla or WordPress. If you are talking by real web design and development I may recommend free tools like GIMP (Image Manipulation), PSPad for HTML/CSS editing, FileZilla (for FTP) transfers, WinSCP for secure transfers (I can't recall if it was actually free), PuTTy as an SSH client (if you need ssh at all). I dislike things like XAMPP but prefer to install MySQL, Apache and PHP manually.

 

WordPress is just good for blogging website, nothing else. I could not find on it anything useful for standard website.

 

It is maybe good for site such as blogging site, but not standard website.

 

Weebly is good tools for beginners but it has a lot of limitations!

 

Sounds like you're talking more about development than design here. My favorite tools are:
IDE: Sublime Text 2 (http://www.sublimetext.com/)
CSS: Compass (http://compass-style.org/) with compass.app to compile, which is $10 (http://compass.handlino.com/)
FTP/SFTP: Sublime SFTP (http://wbond.net/sublime_packages/sftp) runs for free, requires license to remove registration message

For task management, I love Wunderlist (http://www.wunderlist.com/)!

 

That really depends on your definition of good -- just like the WYSIWYG in Dreamweaver or Frontpage, or any automated 'tool' for making websites the code it produces is atrocious, which means by extensions the accessibility of the pages is nonexistent.

From idiotic nonsense like:
<div class="paragraph" style="text-align:left;">

to outright fictional gibberish like
<meta property='og:site_name'

To tables for layout with endless pointless wrapping div for Christmas only knows what

          <div id="content-main">
             <div id='wsite-content' class='wsite-not-footer'>
<div><div class="wsite-multicol"><div class='wsite-multicol-table-wrap' style='margin:0 -15px'>
<table class='wsite-multicol-table'>
<tbody class='wsite-multicol-tbody'>
<tr class='wsite-multicol-tr'>
<td class='wsite-multicol-col' style='width:73.242392444911%;padding:0 15px'>

<div><div id="504637894833059063" align="left" style="width: 100%; overflow-y: hidden;" class="wcustomhtml">

Code (markup):

To static scripting and CSS inlined in the markup -- what it makes is a fat, bloated, slow and ultimately useless train wreck... and that's before one talks the laundry list of 'how not to design a website' from the px metric fonts, fixed widths, fixed height elements the text blows out of and makes it painful to update the content, etc, etc..

Though or some reason such idiocy seems to be the norm for most every "tool" out there that tricks beginners into THINKING they can build a website... again why the only thing about such software and methodologies that can be considered professional grade tools are the people promoting their use.

Weebly, wix, dreamweaver's WYSIWYG, WYSIWYG's in general -- they boil down to either being nube predation or sleazy shortcuts - and as such they tend to bite you in the arse sooner than later. Mostly it's the former, preying upon the ignorance of those just starting out and leading them down the garden path to failure.