Here is a list of over 50 tools and resources that you may find useful in your web development and design work. We all know that us web developers and designers are very busy and often overworked! Therefore, it is important to use tools and resources to help us work that much better and more efficiently. These tools not only make our work easier, but they have the ability to improve the quality of our work as well. My hope is to compile an extensive web directory with as many useful tools and resources as possible! Please help us make this directory functional and all-encompassing by sharing your own helpful tools and resources in the comments to this post. Enjoy!
Design
- BgPatterns A great tool that allows you to download tiled background designs.
- Adobe Kuler The web-hosted application for generating color themes that can inspire any project.
- Web Script Lab AJAX Loading GIF Generator Tool.
- Design Resources Search Engine This custom search engine searches various websites in order to bring you the best design resources on the web.
- Aviary Various online tools for editing photos and images in design work.
- AJAX Loading Another AJAX Loading GIF Generator that can speed up your work time.
- Genfavicon A free online favicon generator.
- Iconfinder This tool allows you to search through more than 100,000 icons for free.
- ConvertIcon This tool is a simple icon utility tool that can import ICO, PNG, GIF, and JPEG formats and export to high-quality PNG or ICO files.
- COLOURlovers A great resource that monitors and influences color trends. This site gives the people who use color a place to check out a world of color, compare color palettes, submit news and comments, and read color related articles and interviews.
- Brusheezy! A place for artists to download and vote for the best custom Photoshop Brushes and photoshop patterns on the internet.
- Adobe Photoshop Tutorials A link to very helpful tutorials about Adobe Photoshop.
- Designers ToolBox A mixture of amazing resources and tools for designers.
- CG Textures This resource is your free source of textures for 3d modeling, texturing, and rendering.
- Squidfingers A great resource for finding patterns and textures.
- DROMOSCOPIO Another great resource for finding patterns and textures.
- Stripemania A simple and free web 2.0 tool to create seamless diagonal stripes for your designs.
- MorgueFile A link to free images for your inspiration, reference and use in your creative work.
- Free Stock Photography Great place to find free stock photos to use in your designs. Unlike other sites with free images, these are also royalty free.
- Pattern Tap Great resource to satisfy and encourage the inspiration needs of my interface design peers and peeps.
- Multicolr Seach Lab A really neat search engine to look for pictures by colors.
- Banco de Imagenes Gratuitas A great place to locate free images to use in your designs.
- Colr Allows you to make color schemes from images.
- DinPattern A great resource website to locate inspirational and useful patterns.
Programming
- Kotatsu A useful tool to help create a table and throw in column classes quickly.
- Free HTML Form Builder The free HTML form builder that allows you to create HTML from 25 beautiful templates very quickly and easily.
- Dummy Text Generator An extremely handy tool that helps you create dummy text for all your layout needs.
- Wordoff A tool that applies the following rules to strip the cruft that is pasted into WYSIWYG editors from Word.
- PXtoEM Simply put, it is PX to EM conversion made simple.
- CSS Menu Generator A neat tool to provide the average webmaster with tools to create custom, cross browser compatible website menus without having to know all the complicated HTML and CSS.
- IzzyMenu An easy to use Menu Builder, which allows you to build your CSS & DHTML menu in minutes.
- CSS Sandbox A simple and quick web toy that lets you explore CSS in real time.
- CSSPlay This resource allows you to easily experiment with CSS.
- CSS Table Gallery A handy CSS table showcase and gallery.
- CSS Redundancy Checker Allows you to find CSS selectors that aren’t used by any of your HTML files and may be redundant.
- Em Calculator A small JavaScript tool which helps making scalable and accessible CSS design. It converts size in pixels to relative em units, which are based on a text size.
- JSLint The JavaScript code quality tool that helps to check your code.
- JS Bin A neat webapp specifically designed to help JavaScript and CSS folk test snippets of code, within some context, and debug the code collaboratively. Also, it allows you to edit and test JavaScript and HTML.
- TinyJS A great site for small, specific library plugins.
- jCryption A JavaScript HTML-Form encryption plugin, which encrypts the POST/GET-Data that will be sent when you submit a form.
- JSValidate A useful form validator that utilizes aspects of prototype and scriptaculous to bring you a simple to execute, non-intrusive JavaScript form validator.
- NicEdit A WYSIWYG editor for websites. Its goal is to be as simple and fast as possible for users of your application. NicEdit is extremely lightweight and can be easily integrated in any site with minimal impact while providing visitors an effective means to express themselves in rich text.
- GetSimple CMS The simplest and smallest CMS that we can use for our customers.
- tlbox A great mixture of tools and links for web developers.
- gotAPI A tool that allows an instant search in HTML and other developer documentation. It contains almost all API languages and frameworks used over internet.
- sIFR A resource that is meant to replace short passages of plain browser text with text rendered in your typeface of choice, regardless of whether or not your users have that font installed on their systems.
- Regular Expression Library A neat site that provides a searchable database of regular expressions. Users can add, edit, rate, and test regular expressions.
- Domize The world’s fastest domain name search engine that allows you to quickly and easily search domain names.
- Snipplr A public source code repository that gives you a place to store and organize all the little pieces of code that you use each day.
- Posteet A place to store, share and tag your favorite tips, tricks and codes in one accessible everywhere place.
- Developer Cheat Sheets The developer cheat sheet compilation that is very helpful.
- Snippets Code repository that allows you to share with other developers. (in Spanish)
- 360 Voltage The really handy web developer’s field guide.
- Social Bookmarking Service Allows you to automatically submit to social bookmarking sites. Highest submission speed possible less then five minutes to 215 bookmarking services.
- CodePaste An very useful online editor for PHP, JavaScript, ActionScript, etc.
- DoTemplate A catalog of free web templates that are fully customizable to your taste and needs. You can easily tweak the colors, the fonts, apply a bunch of graphical effects to create a unique professional template in no time.
I hope you enjoyed the list, and I hope you find them useful in your web work!