Web developers are a technical bunch, and there are many tools out their to help make their job easier. There are 10’s, maybe even 100’s of potentially useful tools for web developers, so here are my top 5 tools for web developers.

Sublime Text 2

SublimeText2_Screenshot

The most well-known code editor on the market – if you’re not using Sublime Text, then you probably should.

Sublime Text understands and highlights all major coding languages, including HTML, PHP, JavaScript, Python, C# and Ruby, coloring the code to make it easier for you to read.

A free ‘evaluation’ license is available, or alternatively you can buy it for a one-off payment of $70. It is available on Windows, OS X and Linux.

Firebug

Firebug

This useful add-on for Firefox which can help web developers to find errors in code or identify why a particular element of the code isn’t working as expected. Simply right-click on the element, then click ‘Inspect Element using Firebug’ – you’ll then see a small box at the bottom of your browser highlighting the particular part of the code.

Another great feature of Firebug is that you can even (as shown in the above screenshot) edit the code in your browser to try different variations to see what looks best.

Firebug is only available for the Firefox browser, though a more basic version; Firebug Lite, is available for all other major browsers.

Lorem Ipsum Generator

Lorem Ipsum

When you’re coding a website, there are times where you probably won’t have any content to add to any pages – either because the client hasn’t sent it over yet, or you simply need a little more time to think what you’re going to write.

In these situations, the Lorem Ipsum Generator can help by giving you ‘dummy’ text to paste into pages and individual content blocks. This way, you and your client will be able to visualise what the website will look like with content.

PlaceIt

PlaceItt

Ever want to show off a new website in your portfolio? Screenshots don’t look great, and taking a photo of the webpage on your dusty monitor doesn’t look great either.

This is where PlaceIt comes to the rescue! Simply select one of 100’s of templates

You can download small images free of charge, but if you wish to have the image in a larger resolution, a small fee is charged.

Pingdom Tools

This is probably my favorite due to it’s simple interface and quick response. Pingdom’s main service is website uptime monitoring, but they also offer a useful selection of tools which web developers may find useful.

For example, once you’ve built a website for you or your client, you’ll want to test it to ensure it’s fast to load (not just on your computer!), and that there are no issues.

Simply head over to Pingdom Tools, enter your website’s URL, hit ‘Test Now’, and it’ll run a speed test.

Don’t worry if you don’t get a great score, as the tool displays the load time of each individual element on your page on a ‘waterfall’ chart, so you can see what exactly is making your website load slowly.

Pingdom Tools Test