As a web designer we deal with many parts, and some of them moving parts that all need to shake hands to produce a beautiful website.
Here is a list of some helpful tools that will help keep everything running smoothly on the site and for your web business.
Web Design & WordPress Online Classes
Design Certifications
Adobe Certified Expert
By passing certification exams and receiving Adobe’s official stamp of completion and become an Adobe Certified Expert (ACE).
International Web Association
This association provides individual classes and certifications.
Lynda.com
Easily access and watch courses from your desktop or mobile device. Apps are available for iOS and Android. Earn a certificate when you complete a course.
Free Training & Examples
W3Schools
Totally Free introductions to html, css and JavaScript and more. Examples and exercises you can test while online.
Html Editors
Professional Editors
Dreamweaver
Web development tool from Adobe Systems. New versions have improved support for Web technologies such as CSS, JavaScript, and various server-side scripting languages and frameworks including ASP, ColdFusion, and PHP.
Rapid CSS Editor
Includes a code inspector, CSS checker and an instant built-in multi-browser preview. You can also try for free and purchase for just less than $40.
Free html Editors
BBEdit
is the leading professional HTML and text editor for macOS.
Notepad++
For Windows OS this is a source code editor that supports several languages. Its use is governed by GPL License.
NetBeans IDE
NetBeans is an open-source integrated development environment (IDE) for developers using Java, PHP, C++, and other programming languages. Also Editing support for Sassy CSS and LESS CSS preprocessors.
List Of HTML Editors
Here is a full list of html editors from Wikipedia.
Photo Editors
Professional Image Editors
The web is more visual know than ever before. It’s important to use the right image and optimize it for different devices and bandwidths.
FireWorks by Adobe.
Still considered the best image optimizer for the web and an easy way to crop images for specific size.
Photoshop & Lightroom
Free Photo Services
Google Photos
reSmush.it Image Optimizer
A WordPress plugin, with the API Key you can optimize JPG, PNG and GIF files up to 5MB.
Testing & Maintenance
W3C Markup Validation Service
This will check your html to make sure.
W3C’s Link Checker
This will check all your links on the site. This should be run at least 2 twice a year.
There are also several WordPress plugins that can do the same job, but I prefer to use as few plugins as possible. If there is one you have used for several years and are happy with please send me a comment.
Browser Addons or Extensions
Web Developer Checklist
Over 40 links for Best Practices to Social Media. Addon extentions for Chrome, FireFox and Microsoft Edge. When adding this to your favorite browser you can run a check on any page.
BuiltWith
See what websites are made with.
Web Developer
SeoQuake SEO extension
See how other site are listed on the web.
for Mozilla Firefox
You will find these extensions at
the Open Menu button ( the 3 vertical Lines) on the top right > Addons
for Google Chrome
You will find these at
Customize & Controls button, (the 3 vertical dots) on the top right > Extensions.
Google Chrome provides a handful of audits. Go to the symbol with 3 vertical dots in the top right corner click > More Tools > Developer Tools > Audits,
then choose
- Performance
- Best practices
- Accessibility
- SEO
WordPress Plugins
Broken Link Checker
This plugin will list broken links and lets you easily fix the problem.
Jetpack
Web Design Business Models, Workbooks & Kits
The Genius Blogger’s Toolkit (TGBTK)
The Genius Blogger’s Toolkit is a large collection of ebooks, PDFs, eCourses and other digital products, packaged into one large bundle and sold at a deep discount. This Toolkit is the third annual edition. Don’t expect to go through this in a weekend or even a week.
More links are on the way, add this page to your Bookmarks or Favorites list.