I work on a WIN98 platform, and my  laptop is now running WIN 2000 Professional. Why WINTEL platforms? A long story but it can be summarized by: cost, speed, availability. Because I am not, primarily a graphic designer, I was never locked into the Macintosh.

Project Management Tools

MS Project: It seems Project has been around forever. I think I did my first Gantt chart with it about 1990. It still has problem micro-managing resources but it is a workhorse.

NIKU Workbench: I was introduced to NIKU during a contract with Best Buy. Release 6 has some nice realtime update features at the enterprise level.

Visio & MS Office: The basic tools of the trade.

HTML Editing Tools:

MS Visual Interdev: Useful when developing in the Microsoft environment.

DreamWeaver/UltraDev: My main tool for rapid prototyping - both for modeling information architectures, and testing 'look & feel' issues. Also the software I recommend for creating and managing small web sites.

Allaire Homesite 4+: this is a truly superb text editor for code development. As a production tool its use of templates is a plus and when massive changes have to be made across many files its recursive search & replace tools are very good. Release 3 & 4 includes an HTML validator as well as improved resources and project management with link checking.

Image Tools:

Adobe PhotoShop 7 with ImageReady: for design work, processing graphics and playing around this program, which is a staple of every designer is irreplaceable. I had the good fortune to be asked to give input into the original product specification for ImageReady 1 and then work with the various alpha releases. Since the second build this has become my principle web graphics tool.

Adobe ImageStyler 1:This vector program is optimized for the web. I am not that comfortable with doing a lot of design work with this tool but it is the cat's pajamas for quickly creating shaded buttons and text. I then past the objects into ImageReady. It is no

LViewPro32: a nice quick and dirty image editor. Especially useful for reviewing images, changing palettes, and trying out optimizing options.

HyperSnap32: This WIN95 Screen capture utility is very useful for generating graphics for user documentation. It allows you to select portions of a screen and save them into a useful format.

QuickRez: This Microsoft free utility is part of the Powertools set. It allows me to quickly change screen resolution and color depth to preview how pages and images will appear in different environments.

JASC AfterShot: This image management tool is one of the more effective for organizing large image collections. Several of the additional features, such a stitching multiple photos together and creating slideshows are very valuable.

Development Environments:

Lotus Notes/Domino: for interactive sites, if you already have a Notes installation this is a pretty good tool. Notes R5 is much more web-friendly than 4X. However this is not a tool to pick up casually. It takes some work.

Vignette StoryServer: This is one very impressive system for very large and very active sites. If I had an extra $450,000 (or so) lying around I might get one. I have had the opportunity to work with this as a large site solution and am very impressed. One of my clients uses the current release of StoryServer with great success. It is not for the faint hearted and requires a strong programming staff. The problem is that it is very easy to misuse and make very expensive mistakes.

Site Management Tools I Use:

Astra SiteManager has a very useful utility for creating a graphic depiction of site traffic. This helps me analyze how people are moving through a site, and spot both bottlenecks and determine if often visited page are buried too deep in a site.

NetTracker from Sane Software: NetTracker is less expensive than WebTrends and has some very useful ad hoc query tools. I have recently recommended it to several clients.