There is a wide variety of commercial, shareware and freeware software available to build and maintain your web pages, edit images and video and submit your galleries. Listed below are just a few of the most popular and recommended programs available. Note that some free programs may require a license for non-commercial use.

Web Design Software

Adobe Dreamweaver ($399) is the most popular professional web design program on the market, but for creating basic web pages, there are free alternatives that will do the job just fine.

Nvu is the best free WYSIWYG web page editor available, and a good choice for newbies. For those comfortable working with code, HTML-Kit is an excellent free HTML editor that can also be used for other scripting and programming languages.

FTP

FTP (File Transfer Protocol) is the means by which you'll upload your web pages to your server or hosting account. There are numerous commercial FTP programs available, WS_FTP and Cute FTP being the most popular. FileZilla and CoreFTP are excellent free FTP programs that should suit your needs just fine.

Image and Video Editors

Adobe Photoshop ($599) is the gold standard in image editing, but it's only necessary if you truly need that sort of capability. Corel Paint Shop Pro ($99) is a popular commercial alternative. Several quality free image editors are available, including the GIMP, PhotoPlus and Paint.net.

For creating thumbnail galleries, you'll want an image editor with batch processing capabilities. Arles Image Webpage Creator and Smaller Animals Thumbnailer are shareware programs that are used by many adult webmasters. Faststone Image Viewer and Irfanview are two popular free image viewers with batch processing features.

Commercial video editing packages include Avid Xpress, Adobe Premiere and Apple Final Cut. Several free video editing utilities are available, but due to their complexity none can be recommended to non-technical beginners. For creating short sample clips from a longer video, the shareware program Allok Video Splitter can easily cut video in any format into equal segments of specified length.

Submission Software

If you plan on building and submitting TGP galleries or free sites, buying submission software is a must. These programs allow you to automate the process of duplicating and submitting galleries to hundreds of TGPs and link lists.

Chameleon Submitter and Advanced Submitter are the most popular TGP submitter programs. The new Chameleon Link List Submitter is the best tool for link list submissions. These programs are licensed on a monthly or yearly basis.