Tools All Web Developers Should Know About
If you are new to web development, you may be unaware of the free tools found all over the internet. In this article, I show the tools that are found in my toolbox.
Firebug (Firefox Addon)
I use this tool the most out of everything in my designer toolbox.
It allows you to make live changes to your websites CSS, HTML, or JavaScript. Microsoft has provided a similar tool for Internet Explorer but it does not match up to Firebugs abilities. If you decide not to add any of these tools, I would suggest to at least getting this one.
Notepad++ is a free source code editor. This is a great option for anything one that is looking for programming software.
I would suggest that you try this out before purchasing one.
An FTP Client is an essential tool for running a website. They speed up the time between uploading and downloading files from your web server. Filezilla was not the first software I stumbled across but ended up being the one I now use for all my FTP needs.
It does not offer anything different that you would not except from a normal FTP Client but this is a better options then purchasing one. It gets the job done.
Thunderbird is an email management tool developed by Mozilla. The software allows you to receive email from all of your account in one handy program.
It’s an awesome solution for email organization.
Google always creates useful applications and Analytics is no exception.
It gives detailed reports about your web traffic. You can see numbers on user country, browser choices, popular pages, bound percentage, and more.
CleanCSS allows you to optimize your CSS to decrease load times and bandwidth usage. It can fix errors, format coding, and other useful options. You and visitors will benefit from an optimization.
BrowserShots helps you ensure cross browser compatibility. It will take photos of your website in over 40 different browsers and allow you to download them for long-term usage.
Browser compatibility is necessary for websites and this tool does it.
Google Webmaster Tools is another wonderful gadget that Google has given us. The Webmaster Tools allows you to basically invite Google to crawl and index your pages, know which keywords are bringing in visitors, gives detailed crawling information, and quite a bit more.
It’s worth checking out!
Site Explorer is similar to Google Webmaster Tools.
You can see top search queries, crawl errors, inbound links, and other information.
Smush.it is an image optimization tool by Yahoo. You have the option of using the site or the Firefox Add-on named YSlow, which contains the tool.
If you download the add-on, it will scan all the images on the page and place make a zip file available for download.
smigl on January 15, 2010, 4:23 pm
These tools must know a web developer, webmaster can not obviously:). Thanks