FTP clients don't exactly make headlines any more, but they're still essential applications for just about everyone who needs to manage a web site, and Wise-FTP is one of the best.

The program makes it easy to enter all the details of your FTP connection, for instance: host name, login details, connection type (FTP or SFTP using SSH2), proxy settings and more. You can enter the details for just as many sites as you need via the built-in Site Manager, then organise them with your own folder structure.

Once connected, Wise-FTP displays one pane for the contents of your hard drive, and another for the remote FTP server. File transfer is straightforward, just drag and drop the files you need from one pane into the other and watch as they're copied.

The program has lots of conveniences to speed up your FTP operations, too. If you want to make a quick edit to a PHP file, say, you might normally expect to download it to your hard drive, open the document locally, save it your hard drive and upload the file again. But here you can right-click a file, choose to open it with the internal Wise-FTP editor, and make your changes right away: much easier.

You also get the ability to synchronise local and remote folders, where Wise-FTP will automatically ensure that the files on your server match those on your hard drive. Or, if you're working with a lot of files, set up the Scheduler and it'll upload them all while you're not around.