Tools For Web Designers

Every­one, espe­cially com­puter peo­ple, love lists of resources. I do as well, and I decided it’s time to share many of the resources that have helped me in my career. All of these resources (except for the print books) are either free­ware, open source, or the appli­ca­tion offers a free ver­sion.Fire­fox

• Fire­bug  - Essen­tial tool for CSS/JavaScript debugging.
• YSlow — Fire­bug add-on to help deter­mine per­for­mance bottlenecks.
• Web Devel­oper Tool­bar — Pro­vides tools to com­pli­ment Firebug.
• Fireftp — The best FTP client and in a browser no less!
• Dust-Me Selec­tors — Scans the page against your cur­rent style sheet to deter­mine extra­ne­ous styles.
• Server Spy — See the server tech­nol­ogy for cur­rent page.
• Col­orzilla — Awe­some color picker.
• HTML Val­ida­tor — Val­i­date pages and clean them with this tool.
• IE Tab — View pages in IE inside Firefox.
• Sele­nium IDE — Record and play­back end-user testing.
• X-Ray — Book­marklet to exam­ine ele­ments in DOM.

Web Worker Appli­ca­tions

• Box.net — Backup your files with this tremen­dous tool.
• Har­vest — Time track­ing utility.
• Jott - Record mes­sages from your phone and add them to var­i­ous applications.
• Gliffy — MS Visio replace­ment for diagramming.
• Yugma - Free video conferencing.
• 101 Essen­tial Free­lanc­ing Resources - Need more than we’ve got here?

Print Books

• Design­ing with Web Stan­dards — A great intro­duc­tion to web stan­dards design by Jef­frey Zeldman.
• CSS: A Defin­i­tive Guide — Eric Meyer’s mag­num opus on CSS.
• Don’t Make Me Think! — The acclaimed intro­duc­tion to usability.
• Codin’ For the Web — Great book to teach appli­ca­tion devel­op­ment to designers.
• Web Design in a Nut­shell — Invalu­able desk­top reference.

Online Books

• Ver­sion Con­trol with Sub­ver­sion — Intro­duc­tion to the pre­cepts of Subversion.
• Get­ting Real — 37 Sig­nals famous work on design.
• O’Reilly Library — Var­i­ous O’Reilly books you can read online.
• The Ele­ments of Typo­graphic Style Applied to the Web

Tuto­ri­als

• W3Schools.com - XHTML, CSS, PHP, SQL, XML, etc.
• Good Tuto­ri­als - Pho­to­shop, Flash, Illus­tra­tor, PHP, HTML, etc.
• PHP for the Absolute Beginner
• ASP.NET 2.0 Quick­start Tutorial
• Learn CSS Posi­tion­ing in 10 Easy Steps

Edi­tors

• CSS Vista = Neat CSS editor.
• PSPad — Sim­ple, fast edi­tor that I used for a long time.
• Aptana — Edi­tor built on Eclipse that, I think, is the best out there.
• Microsoft Visual Web Devel­oper — Free MS edi­tor to cre­ate ASP.NET applications.
• SQLYog — GUI inter­face to MySQL.
• SQL Server Man­age­ment Stu­dio Express — The free edi­tion of the GUI to SQL Server.

Tem­plates

• Open Source Web Design
• The­me­bot — Themes for Dru­pal, Word­Press, Joomla, and phpBB among others.
• Open Web Design
• The Open Design Community
• The CSS Tin­der­box — CSS layouts.
• Lit­tle Boxes — CSS layouts.

Project Management/Version Con­trol

• Assem­bla — Free TRAC/Subversion workspaces.
• TRAC — Slim, exten­si­ble SDLC tool.
• Sub­ver­sion — The great open source source control.
• Tor­tois­eSVN — GUI inter­face into Sub­ver­sion via Win­dows shell.
• AnkhSVN — Browse Sub­ver­sion repos­i­to­ries inside Visual Studio.

Testing/Validators

• UITest.com
• The Scru­ti­nizer — SEO val­ida­tors and analysis.
• Test Every­thing!
• Web Site Tools
• WAMP - Apache, MySQL, and PHP on Windows)

Appli­ca­tion Com­par­i­son

• Wiki Matrix — Com­pare wiki applications.
• Forum Matrix — Com­pare forum applications.
• Web­Blog Matrix — Com­pare blog applications.
• The CMS Matrix — Com­pare CMS applications.
• Open­SourceCMS — Demo var­i­ous CMS’.

Web Designer Blogs/News Aggre­ga­tion

• Design Float — Digg style site for designers.
• Web Developer’s Hand­book — More resources then you could ever need.
• CSS Juice — CSS tips and utilities.
• Smash­ing Mag­a­zine — The best resource for resources.
• .net Develop - Cutting-edge arti­cles on web tech­nol­ogy best practices.