10 Handy Free Web Development Tools For Curious Website Developers
Keeping up with web technologies can be challenging. Modern developers must have these 10 tools.
It may be challenging to keep up with the rapid changes in web technology. Every year, new tools appear, and it appears that older tools often get replaced by more recent rising technology.
A significant portion of the web is frontend development, which has developed into a distinct job path. You’ll need the appropriate tools for the work whether you consider frontend development to be just another skill set or a potential profession.
I’d like to offer my list of the ten essential tools for contemporary front-end development. The majority of them are webapps designed to assist you in building fantastic websites, and they are all entirely free.
- Grid Guide
Grid.Guide, a free online application that enables you to create grids instantly, is first on my list. With the help of this little program, you may create unique gutters and columns according to your own grid preferences.
You enter the website’s chosen width and the total number of columns first. Grid Guide then produces a selection of alternatives for you to choose from.
Plus, you may download PNG copies of each grid for use in Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator. This makes it much easier to construct new grids from scratch without having to do all calculations manually or rely on a grid library containing pre-made grids. - Foundation
Unfortunately, I can’t deny that most front-end engineers prefer Bootstrap. But Zurb’s Foundation has just been updated, and I think it’s worth taking into account as well.
Foundation provides preset CSS classes for grids, fonts, buttons, and other interactive components, similar to the popular Bootstrap framework. However, the simplicity of the design shows that it is not intended to be a universal base.
The Foundation for Email is a sibling library to the new Foundation. This framework was created exclusively for the production of emails.
Both Foundation libraries are excellent, and the Zurb team gives them a lot of support. - CodePen
The majority of developers are already aware of cloud IDEs and how simple frontend development is as a result. Any computer may be used to create code, and you can even save your creations in the cloud to share them online.
Nevertheless, despite the abundance of possibilities, I must admit that CodePen is the finest. It starts up quickly, is really dependable, is simple to use, and automatically updates as soon as you make changes.
Not to mention that it supports almost any library you can think of. Along with HTML preprocessors like Haml or Slim, you may write code in LESS or SASS. Additionally, CodePen allows you to integrate other resources, so you may utilize a website like cdnjs to include additional pertinent libraries.
This dev tool is by far the best for developing code and experimenting with new concepts. Although there are various substitutes, in my opinion, nothing compares to CodePen. - Unheap
A curated collection of the newest JS plugins is difficult to come by. You’ll often need to search via GitHub repositories or scan Twitter for projects that get popular.
But you can easily search through the most recent jQuery plugins using a website like Unheap. They are arranged according to navigation kind, form type, online media type, and other classifications.
It essentially serves as a repository for all the top jQuery plugins available online. It’s also often updated, so you can always discover something fresh. - LivePage
Some of the greatest tools for development are browser extensions. When you make changes to a local file, the page will automatically update thanks to the free Chrome addon LivePage.
As a result, you may make local changes to your HTML, CSS, and JS files and have the browser reload after each save. Even while it just takes a second to refresh, you will quickly realize how frustrating it can be if you do it again. - Fullpage Screen Capture
This addon is one of my go-to tools for building layouts and I often use it. You may take a complete PNG snapshot of an entire website with Fullpage Screen Capture.
Simply click the button in the extension panel of Chrome, and it will automatically take a comprehensive screenshot of the whole page and combine it into one picture. When creating your own website, you may utilize this to examine designs as a whole. - WhatFont
For web design, typography is a significant option that should not be taken lightly. It might be difficult to choose the appropriate font, but you can ease some of the agony by using an extension like WhatFont.
You just need to install WhatFont to Chrome to be able to click and hover anytime you see a font on a page. This provides all the information, including the font style, size, and, if appropriate, the hosting location (like TypeKit or Google Webfonts). - Node/npm
It may be apparent, but Node has altered how web development is done. In addition to giving us npm, one of the fastest-growing package managers ever, it introduced JavaScript to the backend.
This is so important that it’s practically required. All front-end developers should now learn how to utilize the command line since it has become a necessary tool in the web development process. Npm, however, is also a component of this procedure and is entirely controlled via the command line.
You can update outdated packages, fetch new ones, and use npm scripts to do a multitude of tasks.
If you haven’t used npm before, I strongly advise giving it a try to see what all the excitement is about. - Mobile Speed Tester
Google understands excellent UX and is always working to assist webmasters in creating better websites. The Mobile Speed Tester, one of their greatest tools, assigns a score to any website based on its responsiveness and load speed for desktop and mobile devices.
To assess if a website is mobile-friendly, it measures both the speed and user experience.
This study is far from comprehensive, and usability testing should still be conducted. However, for a free tool, this provides some helpful input and may get you going in the right direction. - Responsive Design Checker
The Responsive Design Checker webapp is the last but most definitely not the least. It enables in-browser testing of the responsiveness of any website.
Simply type in a URL and drag the window to the desired width to test for. Additionally, there are tiny buttons for predetermined iPhone, iPad, and standard laptop/desktop resolution sizes.
Another tool by Matt Kersley that is comparable to it lacks changeable sizes. Instead, you are given a few testing periods that have already been specified.
Both are superior tools, and moving your browser window back and forth is considerably more difficult with them.
We’ve now reached the conclusion of my top 10! I really hope that at least one item on this list will be helpful to everyone and that it will be on this list.
Additionally, you can anticipate seeing a lot more fantastic tools in the near future since the custom website development scene is changing so rapidly.
