An online presence with a personal or business website is almost part of our everyday life. To design your own site could be quite an interesting exercise. It also does not need to cost you the earth to make this become a reality either. There are many open source tools available to aid you on this journey. We will share five types of open source software necessary to create your own CMS web site.
When you consider using a CMS as the basis for your web page, you will require specific types of software for the design process.
Web Server
The first piece of software you will need is web server software. All web pages need to be loaded onto a web server to be visible on the internet. One of the popular web servers which I use as well is called XAMPP. It is created and maintained by Apache and Friends, and consists of the Apache Web Server, MySQL, PHP and Perl.
CMS
The CMS is what will be used to write and arrange the code for your website. A CMS is quite useful for giving your site a uniformed appearance. There are many CMS available, with WordPress, Joomla and Drupal being the most popular. All of these CMS have extremely active communities involved with the development of numerous themes and other add-ons.
Graphics
You will probably want to spice up your web page with some exciting graphics. GIMP is also quite a powerful graphics program. It can be used to design buttons, logos and banners for your web site. Graphics are often used to give your site some personality.
Animation
Many websites attract visitors which display incredible animation. There is an open source package called Blender. It is quite daunting to use initially, but once you have mastered Blender, you will be able to create the most amazing animations for your web site.
Web Browser
A web browser is the software used to view web pages from your computer. There are many in web browsers in the open source arena. The one which is downloaded the most and also my browser of choice is Mozilla Firefox.
All of these tools as well as some tutorials can be easily downloaded from their respective websites. There are also many other web sites which have tutorials and user manuals available. Now you have the tools, you just need to get yourself acquainted and soon you too can be designing great web pages of your own.
