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For anyone starting out in this business putting together a collection of the right tools for the job can be a problem. Of course everyone knows the best tools for the job but all too often the cost of those 'best' tools is way beyond your ability to pay for them.

If you simply must have the best tools for the job then perhaps you should consider the possibility of leasing the software. Back when Steve and I were first starting out we wanted Dreamweaver and Fireworks but they were way out of our price range until we found a leasing company that would lease them to us. For just a few bucks a month we had the best and all the payments were tax deductible.

But if you don't have the money and don't have the option of leasing then don't despair. You may not be able to get your hands on the 'best' software but there is plenty of good software out there that costs a whole lot less.

FTP clients
Years ago there was a free version of what was about the best FTP program of its time. WS-FTP worked very well and certainly did everything most new webmasters needed it to do. In fact, it worked almost as well as the paid version and even though there was a time when we had both we would, more often than not, use the free version.

Unfortunately that free version seems to have been withdrawn by the makers but even back then there were other good FTP programs that were free. Today perhaps the best is one called FileZilla. Search Google for that name and you should find it right at the top of the listing.

Image programs
We'd all like to afford to own Photoshop but the cost of that piece of software is certainly prohibitive. Of course there are other Photoshop derivatives that Adobe produces but even those are expensive and probably out of the range of most beginners.

But there are a couple of good free image programs out there. SuperJPG was an excellent free image program years ago but the company that produced that piece of software has gone out of business. However SuperJPG is still out there to be downloaded, all you have to do is look for it.

One that is definitely still available and is easy to find is Image Enhance 3.2.4. Search for that term on Google and you'll find it quite easily.

SEO tools
If you're using FireFox as your web browser then there are some great free SEO tools available as FireFox extensions. Steve's got a bunch of them installed on both his computers and the amount of information he can pull up with just a few mouse clicks is amazing.

You will also find a very useful SEO tool online at whois.sc; we use that tool quite often to start the process of looking at websites that we're competing with for various terms.

SeoMoz is another place with a great collection of online tools that we use quite often to collect data about various keywords and keyword phrases that we will be targeting for clients' sites. Those tools will also give you some interesting information about other sites that are competing for those terms too.

Miscellaneous tools
Need to capture the whole screen or only just a small part of it once or even many times? MWSnap will definitely do the job for you. We use it all the time and it's a real gem.

Do you need to find the color of even the smallest spot that's being displayed on your computer monitor? Then grab Pixie from Nattyware and you will be able to identify the color in hexadecimal, HTML, RGB, CMYK and even HSV. Not only do you get the color but you also get the co-ordinates of the pixel that Pixie is looking at.

By the way, if you were wondering what HSV is then, after looking at Wikipedia, I can tell you that it stands for Hue, Saturation and Value of a color and the 'value' refers to the brightness of the color.

So there are some free tools for your webmaster toolbox. Of course some of them may not be quite as effective as programs like Photoshop but then what do you expect for free?

You will notice that none of the freebies include a graphics program. I'm not sure if there are any out there but I can tell you that if you can't afford one of the Adobe or Macromedia graphics programs and you do want a graphics program then think seriously about PaintShopPro.

It's come a long way since the days of PaintShopPro 4 and there is so much more that you can do with it these days. It might not be free but it certainly does come at only a fraction of the cost of the high-end graphics programs.