This website would have far less to offer picture-wise and would not look a tenth as good as it does if it weren't for countless hours invested by a lot of people developing useful software and then giving it away for free to anyone who wants it.

If you're putting together a website, you might find some of this software to be helpful:

• TSW WebCoder
  A full-featured text editor for quickly generating pages. Notepad is a great way to compose webpages but TSW WebCoder makes it so much easier with its color coding, code libraries, built-in code validators (which I'm stilll learning to use properly), and mini-wizards for common, repetitive scripting such as making a bullet-point list.
• BK Colour Coder
  A wonderful little program that reveals both the hex number and the RGB numbers for any color. It has a nice feature that allows you to "grab" any color on your screen and reveals the code.
• IrfanView
  I've only begun to scratch the surface of what this program can do. I've been using it to batch resize photos and that saves a HUGE amount of time. Something anyone who has ever tried to resize 400+ photos, one at a time, can appreciate.

• JAlbum
  I couldn't believe that this software was free. It's an incredibly powerful program that operates on your own PC. After choosing a skin, e.g., a template for the look and feel of your photo album, you tell it to go. It creates your photo album while you go do something else. That's my kind of software. There are several other free photo album generators out there but I think this is the easiest one to use if you're a novice like I am.

  The others typically involve installing php, MySQL, and an image resizing engine on your server as well as the album software. While that's less daunting than it originally sounds, the learning curve is a bit steep. JAlbum has none of those requirements. All the page generation takes place on your computer and the GUI is very user-friendly.

• ExhibitPlus Skin for JAlbum
  Complete documentation in comprehensible English for every feature, a programmer who is regularly involved in answering intelligent user questions, and an almost unlimited number of variations. The skin comes with JAlbum so there's nothing extra to download. The documentation is what makes the difference. My photo albums are large enough that I want to know what an option is going to do before I tick it. Without documentation, I'd need to create a smaller dummy album, run the program multiple times with a single change each time, and then apply my choices to the real thing. I'm grateful beyond belief to have "cheat sheets" available.

  The resulting files are *.html and *.css files are standards-compliant, meaning that almost anyone should be able to look at your pages without worrying about whether they have the latest version of flash installed or whether their browser can correctly parse your page. The remarks in the generated pages, as well as the files provided to allow complete customization, keep me laughing ("Stupid workaround for IE6 bug") as well as keep me from going too far offtrack. Much appreciated by this complete newbie who's learning by reading the code and seeing what it does.

• Groovy Lizard Web Design

Okay, this isn't freeware since I'm required to provide a link-back to their website in exchange for using their template. Doesn't change the fact that their talent put together a design that I think is visually interesting without distracting from the content - and that they then offered it to everyone without charging money. Muchly appreciated.