Tools for maintaining your website

Even if you have a great content management system for your website, sometimes you need a little outside help to get things done. These are a few tools that you can download and start using right now that will help you edit images and maintain files on your web server.

Resizing and touching up images

No need to buy Photoshop if you simply need to touch up and resize your images. Paint.NET is a free image editing application for Windows that can do much of what Photoshop does. And if you use a Mac, check out Paintbrush. It’s not so great at color correction, but cropping and resizing images are no problem.

Resizing and modifying LOTS of images

If you need to resize 10 or more images, it can get a little tedious to open up each one in your image editor and modify them one by one. But there are specialized applications made for resizing and modifying lots of images at once. FastStone Photo Resizer allows you to select as many images as you like, choose a new size (along with lots of other changes if you like), and output them all at once to a new location on your computer. (Note that the free version is for non-commercial use only. Go ahead and pay the license fee if you use it for your business—it’s worth it!) Mac users should check out SmallImage for a similar toolset.

Managing files on your web server

Sometimes you need to access your web server and upload new files or maybe move some things around. To do so you need an FTP (File Transfer Protocol) client like FileZilla. Available for both Windows and Mac (Linux, too), FileZilla is open source software and, therefore, free to use.

There’s even a tutorial to get you started with the basics of FTP.