This weekend, I’ve been redesigning my personal Web page, which I plan to relaunch either tonight or tomorrow, and as I was taking a break this afternoon, looking around the Web for something to write here, I found this article listing six tools for better Web design.
He lists a couple of sites that I haven’t used such as the Typetester which seems like it will be really helpful. And he takes the concept out of the box a little by listing Mountain Dew and listening to music as tools. So I started thinking about the tools, both concrete and abstract, that help me design Web sites.
- Smultron - After I published a post about creating Web sites from scratch a few weeks ago and trumpeted Notepad and TextEdit, I realized that I needed to get a grown-up text editor. I’m a Mac owner, and I went to download TextMate, not realizing that it costs 40 bucks. So, I started hunting for an open source solution: Enter Smultron. Compared to TextEdit, it’s in another league. It has some limited syntax coloring, and it preserves tabs between lines. But my favorite thing is that it lets you open multiple files in one window. That really helps keep my desktop less cluttered.
- dafont.com - This is a great repository of free fonts. The interface lets you input custom text to be rendered in every font face. And they have categorized the fonts for easier browsing. For me, it’s been an essential tool for designing logos and other graphics.
- Hex Hub - For a site that deals with color, Hex Hub is pretty ugly. That aside, they have a ton of Web-ready color swatches and their hexadecimal equivalents. I use it when I need to find lighter or darker shades of colors. To be fair, I’ve never used Color Schemer, but it costs $50. Hex Hub is free.
- Web Developer Extension for Firefox - This is a great tool for any Web developer. It adds a toolbar to Firefox that lets you have easy access to all levels of the DOM from your browser window. You can turn off CSS or resize your window to see what your sites would look like at different screen resolutions. There are also links for validating all aspects of your code. It’s an absolutely essential tool in my Web development environment.
- Sleep - If you’re stuck on a problem (like I was last night) and you’re deadline will let you break for the night, a good night’s sleep will do wonders for your tired brain cells. I’ve always heard that your brain keeps working while you sleep. So if you feel like you’re at a dead end, go to bed, and your brain will probably figure it out by morning.
- Crystal Light Raspberry Green Tea - Mountain Dew doesn’t do me any good because I’ve been off soda for almost five years now. But I still enjoy sweet tea (I’m a Southern boy, after all). Well, since I’ve been on my diet, I’ve been drinking Crystal Light Raspberry Green Tea. It’s still new, and I couldn’t find a link to it anywhere, but it’s out there. It’s extremely refreshing, and it boosts your energy naturally. Good stuff.
And there you have six more Web development tools. There are a ton of great tools out there. I hope these suggestions point you in some good directions. Thanks again to Josh over at Tutorialaday.com for the idea for tonight’s post.
