15 sites web developers and designers should know
Creating a good website isn’t an easy task, but there’s a few tools that can definitely make your developer or designer life easier. In this article, I have compiled 15 extremely useful website that any web developer or web designer should have bookmarked.
ColorCombos
When designing a website, one of the firsts (and most important) steps of the process is to choose a color scheme.
Color Combos allow you to browse thousand of different colors combinations for getting inspired for your upcomming design. Color schemes can be browsed by colors.
Visit colorcombos.com
LIpsum
Who doesn’t know the extremely popular Lorem Ipsum text? This text is used by webdesigners worldwide to simulate the render of real text on a design.
Lipsum.com allow you to create th desired number of paragraphs of Lorem Ipsum, quickly and simply.
Visit LIpsum.com
What the font?
You just saw a logo or website using a particular font and you enjoyed it. You’d like to use the same font in a design of yours…but you don’t know the font name. At this point, you have only two solutions: Searching for the font during hours, or using the What the font service.
What’s the font allow you to upload a logo or an image containing a font, and it will tell you which font is it. Results are incredibles.
Visit What the font
ConvertIcon
Favicons are a must have for any website, mostly because on modern browsers as such as Firefox, it is displayed along with the site name in tabs. It is also used in bookmarks.
Favicon can be in various file format, including the popular .png. The only problem is that using png as a file format for your site favicon will not work on Internet Explorer. Happilly, there’s ConvertIcon a free online service that allow you to upload an image and get a .ico file, for maintaining compatibility with Microsoft’s browser.
Visit ConvertIcon
BgPatterns
background Patterns is definitely one of the current webdesign trends.
On BgPatterns.com, you’ll be able to browse a wide selection of patterns that you can freely use on your designs.
Visit BgPatterns
HTML Encoder
Do you display code on your website? If yes, you probably know how boring it can be. In fact you have to type < to display <. If you have to display a 50 lines code, this may take a while to manually convert HTML symbols.
The HTML Converter simply takes a code and returns it to you after converting HTML entities. I use this service daily for displaying codes on my blogs.
Note that a HTML Decoder is also available.
Visit HTML Encoder
Xenocode Browsers
In my opinion, Xenocode Browsers is the ultimat tool for checking your website in different browsers. Xenocode Browsers allow you to lauch IE6, IE7, IE8, Firefox 2, Firefox 3, Google Chrome and Opera directly from the web. The only weak point: The service isn’t available for Macs and GNU/Linux powered PCs.
Visit Xenocode browsers
Test Everything
Do you ever wished to be able to test your design in many browsers as well as checking a page PageRank, and even validate your code standards compliance all in one place?
If yes, Test Everything is definitely a site that you should visit. It aggregate over 100 different tools to test almost everything on a webpage.
Visit Test Everything
Sprite Generator
CSS Sprites is definitely a great technique to use, mainly because it reduces the number of HTTP requests. Thought, CSS sprites require time and particular knowledges, which make the technique kinda hard to use, especially for begginners.
The amazing Sprite generator allows you to send a zip file containing your images. It will returns you your images combined into a sprite, and even better, the CSS code that you’ll just have to paste in your main css file.
Visit Sprite Generator
Buttonator
Sure things, good looking buttons is a must have for any serious blog or website. If you don’t know, or haven’t the time to create some cool buttons, don’t worry: Buttonator is an advanced button generator that you can freely use.
By the way, don’t forget to check out our Top 10 CSS buttons tutorials list if you have an interest in CSS buttons.
Visit Buttonator
Load Impact
How many time have you ever seen websites down after they were featured on the frontpage of popular sites as such as Digg or StumbleUpon?
The free Load Impact service will allow you to test how your website can handle various blasts of traffic. The results with sites hosted at WpWebHost are excellent.
Visit Load Impact
IconFinder
Good looking icons are a must have in any professional website. There’s plenty of free icons on the web, so the folks at IconFinder decided to create a collection of free icons for you to use them in your designs. It is definitely easy to find what you’re looking for in seconds.
Visit IconFinder
TypeTester
Testing how fonts will renders on your design is sometimes a fastidious operation. Happilly, TypeTester allow you to test how fonts and their attributes will look. A definitive gain of time.
Visit TypeTester
CSS Tidy
Even advanced developers often needs to optimize their CSS code. CSS Tidy is a free, online application that will fix errors and optimize your CSS code. For example, it can automatically detect redundant styles, a very common problem of CSS codes.
Lots of settings are availables, to ensure you’ll be happy with the results.
Visit CSS Tidy
Contact Forms Generators
Forms are a very important part of any website, because they allow your readers or customers to interact with you. By using Contact Forms Generator, you’ll save a precious time by creating your forms, including the PHP, ASP or even Perl code needed for sending emails from your site to your mailbox.
Contact Forms Generator doesn’t even require programming skills.
Visit Contact Form Generator
