24 Must-Have Online Tools For Web Designers

Jun

2009

Filed Under: online tools, web design | Add a Comment

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Due to the popularity of last week’s list of programs and services for freelancers, we’re bringing you 24 must-have online tools specifically for web designers.

Testing

Xenocode Browser Sandbox

Run and test your sites in IE6, IE7, IE8, Firefox 2 and 3, Safari, Google Chrome and Opera without having to actually install the browsers on your system.

This unfortunately seems to only work on Windows.

BrowserShots

View screenshots of your render webpages in multiple browsers and operating systems. You can even test different screen resolutions.

Favelets

Validate and test your sites using this collection of favelets. Validate microformats, HTML and CSS. Test your pages at different screen sizes (iPhone, Blackberry, etc) and lots more.

Are My Sites Up? (Website Monitoring)

Get alerts when you or your clients’ sites go down or experience hiccups. Alerts can even be sent to your mobile phone.

Page Code Generation

gridr buildrrr

Create CSS grid-based layouts easily with gridr buildrrr.

Project Deploy makes it faster to get a site up and running by letting you select the type of information you want. Deploy then generates common folders, standard HTML and CSS files and even jQuery–all in a zip file for easy download.

Web Form Generators

Icebrrg

Icebrrg lets you easily create all kinds of forms and embed them on your site. There are paid plans, but the free version still allows 3 forms and up to 100 per month.

WuFoo

WuFoo makes creating forms a piece of cake. Adding forms to your site is simple as well with a great web-based user interface.

Web Form Factory

Another great web form tool. You can create forms linked to a database or to generate emails.

Typography

Typechart (CSS Typography)

Browse, compare and grab the CSS code.

PXtoEm.com

Convert pixels to ems quickly. The generator even creates the CSS all for you.

sIFR Generator

Even if you don’t have Adobe Flash installed on your system, you can convert font files (TTF) and create your own Flash files (SWF) for use with sIFR.

Web Code

XHTML Character Entity Reference

Find UTF-8 character entities for XHTML.

View other XHTML character entities resources.

ecoder (Web-Based Code Editor)

Ecoder makes it easier to write and edit code. All your coding can be done right in your browser.

Ecoder sports a beautiful UI, plus real-time code syntax highlighting and line numbering. You can also edit multiple documents at once.

As far as I’m concerned, this one beats out Mozilla Bespin (especially as far as ease of use goes).

BuiltWith

Check websites and see what technologies are being used. See what your favorite websites are running on–databases, CMS, hosting, etc.

Other Online Tools

Unix Permissions Calculator

No more trying to remember Unix permissions codes when updating file permissions.

SlimTimmer

Keep track of the time you spend on projects.

The interface is extremely simple and easy to use. You can also manually add time and filter by date, client and other options.

Media Convert

Convert just about any type of file into just about any format that exists. Just upload and Media Convert takes care of the rest.

Privacy Policy Generator

Easily create privacy policies for sites by just filling out and simple, quick form.

Hohli (Online Charts Builder)

We wrote about Hohli earlier. This is a great tool for generating embeddable charts and graphs. Choose the type of chart, size, data and colors–Hohli does the rest.

Validifier (Flash Embed Code Generator)

A lot of the code generated by sites for embedding Flash content is not valid markup. Validifier turns Flash embed code into valid XHTML (using the object tag).