Secret Stuff Gurus Don't Want You to Know About How to Score Free and Low Cost Web Programs

(AKA Open Source Programs to Create a Website OR Make Your Existing Website Even More Awesome)

I decided to get a little goofy with my headline, so please pardon me. Searching for freebies and cheapies to improve the look and functionality of your website? Before I give you the list, here's how to download an open source program onto your computer, for those who are relatively new at this technology stuff.

 

1. Verify. Make sure the program you're about to download is from the correct publisher and not some rip-off hack.
    
2. Download. Click download. Your download will begin. You can check the Downloads area of your browser to watch the progress of your program downloading.
    
3. Install. Once the program finishes downloading, double click it. It will ask to either save or open. Click open. You will then be prompted to click Next a few times and check off an agreement. Do that too. Be patient while the program installs. When it asks you if you'd like a desktop icon of the program, say yes. It's the easiest way to find it later.
    
4. Restart. You will be asked to restart your computer after the installation is complete.
    
5. Launch. Double click the program's desktop icon to start things up. The program may ask you to agree to a few more things. Do it. Now you can begin using the program.

Free programs for your website or blog and marketing:

Wordpress for a free blog. You can publish blog posts and build a blog-based website quickly and easily using Wordpress. It doesn't cost anything to have a Wordpress-hosted site, though more serious professionals usually prefer to purchase a domain name and pay for hosting as part of their brand building effort.

https://wordpress.com/

Gimp Photo Editing Software. You want to "Photoshop stuff" but you aren't ready to shell out bucks for the program. This is the open source photo editing program that allows you to do that. Use Gimp to make blog and social media headers, add text to images, and tweak logos.

https://www.gimp.org/

Scribus desktop publishing program. If you've ever used Quark to layout newsletters, catalogs, fliers, ebooks and other printed and online publications, then you'll be pleased to know that Scribus works almost exactly the same way, only it's free.

https://www.scribus.net/

Aweber - permission based list manager. If you need to better manage your email contacts and you want to start collecting subscribers via a sign-up box on your blog or website, then you need software that allows you to accomplish this plus market to your list with ease. Aweber gets it done. I've used them for years and so have many of my colleagues. This is a paid program, but reasonably priced, and worth it if you're serious about selling online.

http://www.aweber.com/?307316

Free HTML Editing Program - Kompozer. This is another open source program that, once downloaded, works similarly to Dreamweaver in that you can use it to create and edit HTML files using the built-in WYSWYG editor. 

http://kompozer.net/

FileZilla Open Source FTP. FileZilla is a trusted FTP (File Transfer Protocol) program that will come in handy if you want to build HTML pages and then upload the files to the web.

https://filezilla-project.org/

Hey, thanks for reading.

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