I'm Marc Fite. I've been a commercial photographer in Tulsa for twenty-six years: catalog work, products on white, the occasional building. Two years ago a client asked if I could "put the pictures on the Internet, too," and I said sure, and then went home and bought a book. Since then I've built fourteen sites for small businesses around town, all by hand, and I've tried just about every tool a person can download. My father kept his tools in a wooden chest with labeled drawers, and every tool in it had earned its place. This is my chest.

Notepad. It comes with Windows, it costs nothing, and it never changes a single character you type. Every page I've ever built started in Notepad, and I still use it for quick fixes. One catch: on Windows 95 and 98, Notepad can't open a file much over 64K. It'll offer to open it in WordPad instead. Let it, but save as plain text.

HomeSite. The best money I've spent on software that isn't Photoshop. It's still you typing the HTML, but the tags come up in color so you can see a missing bracket from across the room, you can have a dozen files open at once, and you can search and replace across a whole site in one go. When a client changes their phone number on forty pages, this pays for itself in an afternoon.

Netscape Composer. Free with Communicator, and fine for a quick page if you don't want to learn tags. I use it to rough out a layout and then fix the code by hand.

FrontPage. I tried it once, on a client's machine. It rearranged my tables and added tags I never asked for, and I spent the rest of the day taking them back out. Lots of people like it. I'm not one of them. My Mac friends all say the same thing about BBEdit that I say about HomeSite, and I believe them.

Photoshop 5. I'm a photographer, so it's my darkroom now. Expensive, and more than most people need. I'm told the new 5.5 has a window that shows you what the picture will look like and how big the file will be before you save it for the Web, and that's the first upgrade in years I'm actually tempted by.

Paint Shop Pro. If you're not a photographer, get this instead. It does nearly everything a home page needs, at a small fraction of the price, and you can try it before you buy. Half my clients use it to make their own buttons.

LView Pro. A little program that opens fast, crops fast and saves JPEGs fast. For the fifty-picture catalog job, speed is everything.

IrfanView. Free, tiny, and it opens just about any picture you throw at it. Great for flipping through a folder of scans to find the good ones.

A flatbed scanner. Mine cost about $150. Scan prints at 72 to 100 dots per inch for the screen. Anything more just makes a bigger file that the monitor can't show you anyway.

WS_FTP LE. Your computer on the left, the server on the right, arrows in the middle. Free for home and school use. Here on GeoCities.us you can use the File Manager for a file or two, but when you've changed twenty pages, FTP is the way. The GeoCities.us File Manager page has the settings.

CuteFTP is the other one people like, and it lets you drag files across like in Windows Explorer. On a Mac, everybody uses Fetch.

The one setting that matters: send HTML files as ASCII (text) and pictures as binary. Get that backward and your pictures arrive broken. Most programs have an automatic setting that decides for you. Turn it on.

1. Build with the table borders on. Set border="1" on every table while you work, so you can see where the cells really are. Set it back to 0 when you're done.
2. Keep a spacer. A GIF one pixel square, completely see-through, called spacer.gif. Stretch it with WIDTH and HEIGHT to hold a gap open exactly where you want it: <img src="spacer.gif" width="20" height="1" alt="">. Browsers don't agree about empty table cells, but they all agree about a picture.
3. WIDTH and HEIGHT on every picture. The browser can lay out the page and show the words before the pictures arrive.
4. Lowercase file names, no spaces. Windows doesn't care whether it's Photo.JPG or photo.jpg. The server does. Half the broken pictures I've ever fixed for somebody came down to one capital letter.
5. Two windows, one key. Notepad and the browser both open. Save, Alt-Tab over, Reload. You'll do it a thousand times a night. If the browser keeps showing you the old page, hold Shift while you click Reload in Netscape, or press Ctrl and F5 in Explorer, to make it fetch a fresh copy.
6. JPEG for photographs, GIF for flat art. And never open a JPEG, change it and save it as a JPEG again, over and over. It loses a little quality every time. Keep the original and save a fresh copy from that.
7. The master copy lives at home. Keep the whole site in one folder on your own hard drive, change it there, and upload. Back that folder up to a Zip disk every Friday. The day the server has a bad day, you'll be glad.
8. View Source. Every trick I know, I learned by finding a page that did something I liked and choosing View, Source. It's the best teacher on the Web, and it works nights and weekends.

A quarter goes in the jar every time one of these costs me an evening:

• A client's logo in a fancy font that nobody else's computer has. Charlotte Purvis's page on fonts for Macs and PCs saved me a quarter a week once I read it.
• A background color that looked peach on my monitor and pink on the client's. Now I pick from the 216 safe colors on Tom Ulmer's chart, and the jar's been quiet.
• Forgetting the closing </table> tag. Explorer forgives you. Netscape shows a blank page. Test in both.
• The client who asks for music on the front page. That's two quarters.

The jar is up to $31.75 since January. It's going toward a new tripod.

people have opened the chest since April

Got a tool I should try? Tell me why it deserves a drawer.
Marc Fite · [email protected]
Last updated Wednesday, September 22, 1999