Dreamweaver – A great IDE for HTML, CSS, Javascript, PHP, etc which makes it easy on the eyes when coding.

Flash – For creating very animated websites and add spice to whenever your doing. Also can be used to display movies too.

Adobe Photoshop – For designing almost anything your mind can think of, but I use it for design layouts for websites, flyers and decorating graphics.

Now these tools are the best tools out there but the thing about it, IT COSTS MONEY!!!!

The new Dreamweaver CS4 costs:

• Buy US$399*
• Upgrade from US$199*

The new Flash CS4 costs:

• Buy US$699*
• Upgrade from US$199*

The new Photoshop CS4 costs:

• Buy US$699*
• Upgrade from US$199*

If you are a student you can get a 80% discount only if your school is on the Adobe list for discounts.

Now what about every body else that wants to design websites? What will you do when it is time for you design websites? Are you going to use Notepad? Well I have found solution for you.

I have found alternatives to all these expensive programs:

1. Quanta Plus (Dreamweaver) – Quanta Plus is a highly stable and feature rich web development environment. The vision with Quanta has always been to start with the best architectural foundations, design for efficient and natural use and enable maximal user extensibility. We recognize that we don’t have the resources to do everything we would like to so our target is to make it easy for you to help make this the best community based desktop application anywhere. Pretty much everything in Quanta is designed so you can extend it. Even the way it handles XML DTDs is based on XML files you can edit. You can even import DTDs, write scripts to manage editor contents, visually create dialogs for your scripts and assign script actions to nearly any file operation in a project. You can even look at and communicate with a wide range of what happens inside Quanta using DCOP.
2. OpenLaszlo (Flash) – Before OpenLaszlo 4.0, OpenLaszlo applications were compiled in .swf format to run on Adobe’s Flash Player. With OpenLaszlo 4.0 (OL4), we added the option of compilation to DHTML (browser-native JavaScript). OpenLaszlo 4 handles browser idiosyncrasies so you don’t have to.
3. Gimp (Photoshop) – It has many capabilities. It can be used as a simple paint program, an expert quality photo retouching program, an online batch processing system, a mass production image renderer, an image format converter, etc.

With these alternatives they are both for windows and linux and FREE!