YNOT – In an economic climate that has many companies and individuals scrimping to afford the necessities, much less luxuries, it’s nicer than ever to discover no-cost and low-cost tools that are truly helpful. Thankfully, the web is home to a vibrant community of open-source product developers who release their creations into the wild free of charge.

We’ve found five resources we like, and we plan to post future collections as often as possible. If you’re particularly fond of an open-source, freeware or shareware tool, please [EMAIL=newsdesk@ynot.com]let us know[/EMAIL] about it! We’ll credit you for the tip, if you like. Likewise, if there’s a specific kind of tool you seek, let us know, and we’ll see what we can round up.

On to our first grab bag of resources:

KompoZer is a complete web authoring system that combines file management and easy-to-use WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) webpage editing. The product can be ideal for non-technical computer users who want to create an attractive, professional-looking website without learning HTML or other coding.

Easily adopted by Windows, Mac and Linux users, KompoZer is particularly helpful for creating and editing cascading style sheets (CSS). The software’s rendering engine employs Gecko — the same layout engine used by Mozilla’s Firefox browser.

Firebug, another site-authoring tool, also is based on Gecko, which should surprise no one since Firebug is a Firefox extension. Beloved of developers for years, the product allows easy experimentation with CSS and other website code without the need to refresh a page ever time you make a minor change. The product’s JavaScript console means Firebug works with any operating system on which Java and Firefox have been installed.

The Web Developer extension for Firefox adds a menu and a toolbar containing an array of resources to Mozilla’s popular browser. Developer Chris Pederick originally created the tool for himself but expanded and released the product globally after discovering his personal needs actually were fairly universal. Web Developer is updated and upgraded frequently.

Quanta Plus (alternate link here) is a Linux-based web-integrated development environment for HTML, XHTML, CSS, XML, PHP and most other XML-based scripting languages. Part of the KDE Linux desktop environment, Quanta Plus is capable of both WYSIWYG and hand-coded design. Although it offers a wide variety of features, the product really shines in PHP development and debugging. It also allows users to work with multiple pages at once.

Piwik is open-source software that provides detailed web analytics in real-time. Among the data provided are the search engines and keywords visitors used to find your site, the language they speak, your most popular pages, and much, much more. Coded in PHP for MySQL, the download is quick, and the software requires only five minutes to install. Piwik is particularly helpful when used in conjunction with Google Analytics, but it also does a bang-up job of stats analysis all by itself, thanks to an active developer community that frequently releases new plug-ins and a customizable interface that allows you to give priority placement to the data you use most.