10 Useful tools for web designers!
I was watching a TED video about how the internet as we know it, is only in existence because of the vast commitment, goodness and generosity of people in the online community. Inspired by this, I decided that it’s about time that I compiled a list of useful tools for web designers, which I use regularly.
Website Grader
Website Grader is a great tool for monitoring how well your website evaluating how well your site is structured for the internet. It allows you to identify areas needing improvement and gives your website a grade out of 100. It also allows you to compare your website against competing sites.
Copyscape
Copy scape is a very useful tool for web designers as it allows you to crawl the web and see if anybody has plagerised your content. You can also use it to ensure that you have not inadvertently duplicated somebody else’s copy.
This is important not just for copyright reasons but also for Google’s duplicate content penalty.
Type Tester
Ever struggled to find the right font for a site? Type tester allows you to compare different fonts, weights, styles and sizes side by side. Its a great tool for identifying what really works!
Color Combos
Color Combos is a cool litte web tool that allows you to see an array of colour combinations and browse recommended colour swatches from other users. Its a good source of inspiration when you’re stuck in front of a blank Photoshop document.
IdentiFont
Every now and again I stumble across a really good looking font but I can’t figure out what it is. Identifont attempts to answer that by asking you a series of questions about the font and then shows you a series of possible matches. It’s not always accurate though and can give you a wide range of possible matches but for the most part – it is quite good.
Stripe Generator
Stripe generator is a quick and easy way of creating stripes for a website and is fully customisable from colours, stripe widths and distances between stripes. A great time saving tool.
TweetDeck
All web designers should be harnessing the power of social networking. However, it can be hard to keep on top of all of your profiles and in touch with all of your contacts.
TweetDeck is a great toll for bringing together Twitter, Facebook & Myspace. You can update these sites using this one application. It also notifies you when you have been mentioned on these sites!
BrowserShots
There is such a vast array of operating systems and browsers in use by people around the world. It is our duty as web designers/developers to ensure that all people can access our work on any platform – yes even IE6.
Testing on all of these different systems is quite tricky if you don’t physically have them to test on. That’s where browser shots comes in. It visits your site on all of the platforms that you selected and provides you with a screen shot of how your page appears on each system. Although, you can’t use it for usability as it is just an image. Good nonetheless!
LoadImpact
How annoying is it when you have to wait for a website to load? Very! That is why we must ensure that we keep loading times to a minimum. To do this we must test the impact that multiple users have on your website. Unless you get everybody in the office to visit a certain website simultaneously, you’re not going to get an accurate representation.
Load Impact conducts a series of tests on a given page and provides you with results indicating your websites performance – you get some nice charts too – we all love pretty charts don’t we!
Smush It
Smush It is a great little tool from yahoo. It allows you to further optimise your images to ensure that loading times are reduced. We’ve already discussed why it is important for websites to load quickly!
Smush It works by you entering the url to a certain image – smush it then compresses it without losing quality and also illustrates how much it has reduced the file size by! It doesn’t always manage to squeeze out file size but when it does it can make a massive difference.
http://developer.yahoo.com/yslow/smushit/