Every kind of work implies the use of tools to make it more productive and professional. Whether it’s the industrial sector or the agriculture sector, tools work more profoundly and more quickly than manpower. Similarly, a number of tools are used by web designer to craft the most creative and professional looking websites within hours.
A web designer may not be termed one if they don’t use specific designing tools to craft a website from its conception to the end result. With several web design tools available today, we have handpicked only five effective ones for you:
1. Adobe Fireworks
Accessible by the Mac and Windows operating systems, adobe fireworks is a vector graphics editor hybrid from Adobe. Fireworks differ from Photoshop in a sense that it’s exclusively designed for web designers and offers a wide range of tools and choices to design a complete web layout easily.
The distinguished features of this tool are:
• Slicing and dicing a design copy into HTML/CSS. However, its better if you don’t use the auto generated source code.
• Capacity to enclose the complete website design as a PDF, along with clickable components for interactive and striking website prototypes
• Ensures search engine friendliness by providing optimization tools that help in making your web graphics smaller in size and easily downloaded.
2. Adobe Dreamweaver
Dreamweaver also incorporates with other admired Adobe products such as Photoshop, enabling you to share smart objects for quick and easy renewing and editing of graphics and images. This commercial web application is a fully loaded tool box for web designers including the following features:
• Wrong Grammar and syntax identification with smart Code Hinting
• A built-in FTP client
• Includes project management and workflow alternatives
• Illustrates the preview of your source code in the form of “Live View”
3. Panic Coda
The basic aim of panic coda is to decrease the quantity of applications you require for developing a website including FTP client, CSS editor, version control system and much more.
This tool entails a “one-window web development” idea by using a single tabbed interface for text editing, file transfers, SVN, CSS, and also web books. The straightforward and easily understandable interface of this tool made it acquire the Apple Design Awards two years back.
4. Adobe Photoshop
Photoshop is most probably found in every web designer's toolbox, and it should be too. This tool is ideal software to control images, picture and graphics and is extensively used by designers and photographers. Photoshop is rich with all kinds of options and features a designer would want:
• Filters allow you to automatically insert effects to your selected image
• Brushes, actions and scripts allows mechanization and wide variety to edit images
• Layers and revert option work great as workflow boosting features
5. Firebug
This Firefox tool works best when used in connection with the Developer toolbar. Its special features like DOM inspector, HTTP request logger, header inspector, and CSS and HTML editing tools makes it an essential tool in web designing.
Basic features include:
• Inline HTML and CSS editing for modification or editing
• Console for logging
• JavaScript
• Innate Document Object Model (DOM) inspection tool to show you the co-relation between page elements
These five tools are a must in every successful web designer’s toolbox. If you are missing out on any of these, you can’t term yourself to be a savvy and updated designer yet.
