A very useful html editor which allows you to write snippets or blocks of code which you then copy into your html.  I was able to use it to edit the templates as easily as I do in Frontpage html view.  It also has an html beautifier to tidy up your code and a code verifier to ensure you are using valid xhtml.

Needs Java JRE installed.  (Free)

Blue Voda Website Builder is designed to be used with a Vodahost account.  Although you could use the editor to help you understand html and css styling and positioning, to use the html it produces you would still have to edit it, and it is not xhtml compliant.

On the other hand, if you want to build yourself a large site very fast with great widgets, easy to understand tutorials and excellent support in the forum, then get yourself a Vodahost account at less than £5 per month*.  You can upload direct from the Blue Voda Website Builder to your live site.

*(I earn affiliate income when you take out hosting with Blue Voda via the links above)

NVU is an easy to use wysiwyg (What You See Is What You Get) which you can also use to upload your pages. I still recommend uploading your pages via FTP but you have the option. A very useful editor and similar to expensive software like FrontPage or Dreamweaver to use.  NVU has an xhtml code validator.

Tutorial http://www.nvudev.org/guide/pdf/nvuug10r1.pdf

The Swiss Army Knife of html editors.  Very good for creating templates and pages by hand.  A huge number of plug-ins extend HTML Kit's functions make it very versatile.

Inserts valid code snippets ready to personalise in a similar way to when you edit the templates from our site.

PSPad is a text and code editor useful for working with html, php and css style sheets.  It has Top Style Lite built in for css editing, a colour picker, html symbol reference and highlights the html code making it easier to see.

Easy HTML is a free and extremely useful html editor for those used to working in html and using html and php code snippets.  It makes editing the templates I use for the Galen's Garden and satellite pages very easy but as they are PHP pages you will not see anything that is designed to operate as an includes page in the preview screen.

Irfanview allows you to apply special effects to your images, perform all the usual cropping and resizing functions you would expect from a photo editor.  You can batch edit to change file size, optimise or resize images.

Lots of plug-ins available

Easy Thumbnail is a simple and easy to use tool for batch conversion of images to create smaller thumbnail images or to change the file extension to a different type.

It does not optimise images as such.

XNView is a free picture viewer and editor with a screen capture facility, batch conversion tool for cropping, optimising, renaming and resizing images.

You can apply filters and effects to your images as well.

The Gimp is one of the most complex and useful image editing and manipulation and drawing software.  You'll have fun with this.  It is a bit of a learning curve but comes with an online manual. http://docs.gimp.org/en/

You must install GTK Runtime before you install the Gimp and when I installed it on my system with Windows XP Pro (SP2) it had to rename xmlparse.dll and xmllok.dll in the Windows/system32/ folder. If you have existing software that relies on these dlls, you may find you have to choose between them.

Inkscape is an Open Source vector graphics editor, with capabilities similar to Illustrator, Freehand, CorelDraw, or Xara X using the W3C standard Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) file format.

Supported SVG features include shapes, paths, text, markers, clones, alpha blending, transforms, gradients, patterns, and grouping. Inkscape also supports Creative Commons meta-data, node editing, layers, complex path operations, bitmap tracing, text-on-path, flowed text, direct XML editing, and more. It imports formats such as JPEG, PNG, TIFF, and others and exports PNG as well as multiple vector-based formats.

Project Dogwaffle is a free Painting and Animation Software for PC by Dan Ritchie for people who love to Draw, Sketch, Animate and Paint.

 Various Pro versions available from $19 - $119

Artrage is a painting programme with different media and brushes to play with.  Worth buying a drawing tablet for.

The Professional version has a lot more toys and is very affordable.

FTP software which you can use to upload and download files to and from your web site if you have ftp access.

Needs FTP access (user name and password)

Lets you write, delete and edit Wordpress or other blog posts from your PC. Needs a MySQL database.

You can manage posts but not pages.

Get a free Blog on http://wordpress.com/

Saves us hosting it!

A complete free office suite which not only converts documents into the Microsoft equivalent but also into PDF format.

Includes Writer, a document writer similar to Microsoft Word; Calc, a spread sheet calculator similar to Microsoft Excel; Impress, presentation software similar to Microsoft Powerpoint; Draw, a powerful graphics package and  Base, a database package similar to Microsoft Access.

Great for creating presentations similar to Microsoft Powerpoint.  You can take screen shots as you work for training purposes or indeed for trouble shooting.

Add step by step care guides to your web site to show people how to groom or handle their animal.  Show over time how an animal recovers from illness or ill treatment.

A great tool for quick and easy screen shots either timed or taken using the short cut keys.

Smartision Screen Copy can also produce an album of selected screenshots.

Very useful if you are creating a links page like this one and want to illustrate it withscreen shots of the web sites themselves.

WinSnap is a small enhancement utility for taking and editing screenshots. It can easily capture windows of non-rectangular form with the background of your choice, automatically perform simple canvas transformations and coloring effects, add professional smoothing shadows in Photoshop style and more. WinSnap supports a variety of image formats and provides advanced auto-save features.

Colour picker tools are ideal for finding the right colour from your images to use as the text colours for your web site.

Some of the best web site designs use a very limited palette of colours taken from the main image used on the page.

Color Pic allows you to save a visual reference of the colour as part of a palette of colour which is very useful when designing your web site.

The same site has some other useful free software and some very sophisticated screen tools if you need then at good prices.

From the same source as the Color Pic tool above, View Source Editor is a tiny tool which allows you to change the editor that the computer uses when viewing the source code of a site.

Clicking on View - Source on Internet Explorer's menu bar lets you see the html code used to build the web page you are viewing.  This is a great way of learning how to build sites you like or figuring out how the competition are higher up in the Google rankings than you are.

By default, IE uses Notepad which is very limiting.  I prefer to use PSPad as it has good html layout and highlighting.  This tool lets me use PSPad instead of Notepad which is great.

I do a lot of work on the computer and my desk top needs regular tidying up.  Plus I test a lot of free software and have a fair amount of software installed to build web sites.

Tray bar is a small utility which adds a single icon to the bottom menu bar but lets you configure any number of menus to give you quick access to your programs, music, email or anything else on your PC.

I do a lot of work on the PC and that creates huge amounts of unwanted files which, if not removed, cause the computer to gradually slow down.

Crap Cleaner is a great way of getting rid of the trail of detritus which remains from surfing the net, creating and moving files, installing and uninstalling programs, and just generally using the PC.  You can save important cookies so they don't get deleted.

I like Easy Cleaner.  I use it in conjunction with Crap Cleaner.  Unlike Crap Cleaner, Easy Cleaner removes those tmp and other temp files such as bak backup files that slow the PC down.

It has a very user friendly interface and is fast as well as easy to use.

Not a tool that everybody needs but a very useful one if you have a lot of fonts to manage andlike to work on web sites or publications of any kind.

Windows lets you view individual fonts using Font Viewer but The Font Thing allows you to visually explore whole folders of fonts in one go. 

You can choose what font size to view the fonts in making it very easy to choose the best font for your job.

Fonts do not always have user friendly names.

This tool reverts the odd _Font type names in user friendly font names which makes working with fonts way easier.

If you publish newsletters, flyers, leaflets, adverts or other documents for print, then Scribus is a great piece of software.

Better in many ways than Microsoft Publisher. A great piece of software to compliment the Open Office Suite.

The most comprehensive animal shelter management software package which dovetails nicely with Open Office and gives you a huge range of management tools for your rescue.

The site is well worth exploring if your rescue is expanding fast and the paperwork is getting on top of you.