Tools for Web Designers on a Budget
About three years ago when we started designing websites, we decided to operate with little overhead. Even though we were confident we could make it as freelancers, there was some fear that things might not go as planned. Because of this, we didn’t go out and spend lots of money on expensive software. Our focus was on being frugal and saving money where we could. One way we were able to this was using free online tools, or web applications to perform many of our tasks a freelancers.
Here are some free online applications.
Pixlr and Sumo Paint
Pixlr and SumoPaint are a powerful online image editing applications. Although they can’t do everything Photoshop can do, they have some very impressive features considering it is all done within the browser.
The Typetester’s primary role is to make web designer’s life easier.It is an online application for comparison of the fonts for the screen. As the new fonts are bundled into operating systems, the list of the common fonts will be updated.
net2ftp is an online. It gives you a fully featured ftp client within your browser.
WhatTheFont allows you to submit an image to find the closest matches in their database.
Color Scheme Designer with a brand new interface i a cool color scheme generating engine.
FontStruct is a free font-building tool. It lets you quickly and easily create fonts constructed out of geometrical shapes, which are arranged in a grid pattern, like tiles or bricks. Once you’re done building, FontStruct generates high-quality True-type fonts, ready to use in any Mac or Windows application.
Adobe® BrowerLab gives you the ability to preview and test your websites in multiple browsers and operating systems. Since building a website to be cross-browser compatible is one of the more annoying aspects of web design, this should be a valuable web app to all of us.
The Markup Validator is a free service by W3C that helps check the XHTML and CSS validity of Web documents.
ViewLikeUs allows you to check out how your website looks in the most popular resolution formats. It’s all powered by Ajax & PHP.
Pingdom Tools allows you to run load time tests on your web pages. It mimics the way a page is loaded in a web browser. The load time of all objects is shown visually with time bars. You can view the list of objects either in load order or as a hierarchy. The hierarchy view allows you to see which objects are linked to in for example a CSS file.
