Standardized Tools
The Office of Communications recommends the following tools for web editing. Some of the tools below required a paid license to use. Please work with your department and Northwestern University purchasing guidelines for the software below. In some cases, academic licensing can be purchased at a cost lower than retail price.
Graphic Editing
- Adobe Photoshop - professional graphic/photo editing tool
- Picasa (free) - allows basic manipulation of images such as cropping and resizing.
PDF Files
- Adobe Acrobat Professional - ability to create, edit, and view PDF documents.
- Adobe Reader (free) - ability to only read and print PDF documents.
- PDF Forge (free) - cannot edit PDF files, can only create them from a premade document. This program essentially acts a printer and you can "print" to a PDF file. Links and other markup are removed from the PDF document.
Editing HTML/XML/CSS files
(NOTE: An HTML editor is not necessary for creating/editing pages in our web-based CMS tool.)
- Dreamweaver - can edit many types of web documents including HTML, XML, CSS, XSLT, PHP, etc.
- Notepad++ (free) - can edit the same types of documents as Dreamweaver but has less features. It does include context coloring for these documents.
Zip Files
(NOTE: Windows XP/Vista/7 and Mac OS X or newer have built-in capabilitys to create/edit/open ZIP files)
- 7-zip (free) - can create, edit, and open a number of archived files including ZIP and RAR.
Website Statistics
- Google Analytics - you must have a google account to access analytics.
This page last updated Oct 24, 2011