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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

Online Books

Tutorials

Editors

Templates

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

Application Comparison

Web Designer Blogs/News Aggregation

One Comment

  1. Great resource list! There are actually a few on here that I had never heard of. I’m glad you included print books. We forget about those sometimes.

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