35+ Useful Web Design Tools

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There are lots of web design tools available on internet, which will help you accomplish your tasks easily and quickly, and still more are coming. Every designer now has his/her own toolbox. I will try to make such toolbox for you too. I have collected 35 useful web design tools and if you know more feel free to add in the comments.

This article will showcase tools which should and could be used by designers daily. If you need some inspiration – you can visit the most popular and recommended design showcase sites to find really good works and examples. Check out design related tools, online generators, free fonts, template sites, great websites helping to test and manage websites – those all have been created to save your time! Remember -  not always the best way is to create everything by yourself. Be smart and you will accomplish your tasks much easier and quicker without struggling!

1. Deviantart

Deviantart is one of the largest artist showcases on internet. You can find some great inspiration here.

2. Web design library

Web Design Library is an internationally refereed resource that provides a platform for the dissemination of design thinking and research. It covers all theoretical and practice-oriented aspects of the effective, efficient and attractive presentation of information on-line.

3. Stylevault

Stylevault.net is a design showcase where web designers can show off their talents and get inspiration as well as giving it.

4. Behance

Behance is a very great place for inspiration, because there are more professionals with stunning designs.

5. The design inspiration

The Design Inspiration is created by a group of designers who are seeking various design inspiration every day.

Design tools

6. Colour lovers

COLOURlovers is an international community of designers and artists of all kinds who visit the site to get color inspiration, ideas and feedback for both their professional and personal projects. COLOURlovers’ loyal members create colors, palettes and patterns to nurture their ongoing love affair with color.

7. Adobe kuler

Adobe kuler is a web-based application by Adobe that helps you create and share color themes.

8. Color hunter

Color Hunter is a place to find and make color palettes created from images.

9. Colorotate

With ColoRotate, you can work with colors in 3D, in real time, and in a way that matches how our minds process color.

10. Stripemania

Stripemania is a simple and free web 2.0 tool to create seamless diagonal stripes for your designs. You are able to choose the size of the stripes and the spacing between those. You can even add color gradient effect for all of your stripes.

11. Fontstruct

FontStruct lets you quickly and easily create fonts constructed out of geometrical shapes, which are arranged in a grid pattern, like tiles or bricks.

12. Dafont

A great website which allows you to browse fonts alphabetically, by themes, or by date. Most of the fonts are free to download.

13. Icon finder

Icon search engine with over 100 000 free icons.

14. Whatthefont

Seen a font in use and want to know what it is?

Submit an image to WhatTheFont to find the closest matches in our database. Or, let cloak-draped font enthusiasts lend a hand in the WhatTheFont Forum

15. Lorem Ipsum

Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry.

Coding tools

16. Typeteste

The Typetester is an online application for comparison of different typefaces. Its primary role is to make web designer’s life easier.

17. Typeface.js

With typeface.js you can embed custom fonts in your web pages so you don’t have to render text to images.

18. Firebug

Firebug integrates with Firefox to put a wealth of web development tools at your fingertips while you browse. You can edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page.

19. Smush.it

Smush.it uses optimization techniques specific to image format to remove unnecessary bytes from image files. It is a “lossless” tool, which means it optimizes the images without changing their look or visual quality

20. pForm

HTML form creator.

21. Zend Studio

Zend Studio 7.0 is the next generation of our professional-grade PHP application development environment. It has been designed to maximize developer productivity by enabling you to develop and maintain code faster, solve application problems quickly and improve team collaboration.

22. Fire FTP for Firefox

FireFTP is a free, secure, cross-platform FTP client for Mozilla Firefox which provides easy and intuitive access to FTP servers.

23. Expandrive

ExpanDrive acts just like a USB drive plugged into your Mac or PC. It lets you open, edit, and save files on remote computers from within your favorite programs. ExpanDrive enhances every single application on your computer by transparently connecting it to remote data.

24. W3C Validator

The W3C validator is a free service by W3C that helps check the validity of Web documents. Also available CSS validator.

25. jQuery UI

jQuery UI is an open source library of interface components — interactions, full-featured widgets, and animation effects — based on the stellar jQuery javascript library . Each component is built according to jQuery’s event-driven architecture (find something, manipulate it) and is themeable, making it easy for developers of any skill level to integrate and extend into their own code.

26. Clean AJAX

Clean is an open source engine for AJAX, that provides a high level interface to work with the AJAX technology.

27. Refelction.js

Reflection.js allows you to add reflections to images on your web pages. It uses unobtrusive javascript to keep your code clean.

28. Blueprint CSS

Blueprint is a CSS framework, which aims to cut down on your development time. It gives you a solid foundation to build your project on top of, with an easy-to-use grid, sensible typography, useful plugins, and even a stylesheet for printing.

29. CleanCSS

CleanCSS is a powerful CSS optimizer and formatter. Basically, it takes your CSS code and makes it cleaner and more concise.

30. XHTML Character Entity Reference

This page contains the 252 allowed entities in HTML 4 and XHTML 1.0, as outlined in section 24 of the official HTML 4 specifications, published by the W3C.

31. Pingdom

Pingdom offers cost-effective and reliable server, network and website monitoring. We use a global network of servers to monitor our customers’ sites 24/7, all year long. The service includes statistics for uptime and response time, and can send out alerts via SMS and email.

32. Lightbox 2

Lightbox is a simple, unobtrusive script used to overlay images on the current page. It’s a snap to setup and works on all modern browsers.

33. WIX

Free flash page builder.

34. Best free templates

BestFreeTemplates.info offers exclusive CSS templates of various categories, available for free downloading. Our free templates can be easily called one of the best free templates in the Internet. Qualitative CSS layout, absolutely unique professional web design – all this being an incontestable advantage of our free webtemplates. That’s what allows us to characterize our website templates as the best free templates.

Testing and managing site

35. Browsershots

BrowserShots is a web-based browser compatibility check tool that lets you easily preview how your website looks in all popular browsers. No email or registration required, submit your web URL and wait 3-5 min for BrowserShots to generate screenshots for each browser.

36. Browsercam

See your web design on any browser on any operating system. Check javascripts, DHTML, forms and other dynamic functionality on any platform. Not just yours. Use our bank of testing machines remotely to test your website.

37. Are my sites up?

Are my sites up is a simple service that notifies you when your sites goes down.

38. Google analytics

Google Analytics is the enterprise-class web analytics solution that gives you rich insights into your website traffic and marketing effectiveness. Powerful, flexible and easy-to-use features now let you see and analyze your traffic data in an entirely new way. With Google Analytics, you’re more prepared to write better-targeted ads, strengthen your marketing initiatives and create higher converting websites.

39. W3Counter

W3Counter is your free, hosted website analytics solution for answering the key questions about your website: who’s your audience, how they find your site, and what interests them.