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The Web Designer’s Toolbox
July 30th, 2008 | Posted in Web Design.
Like every good master of the trade, there are tools that make the job easier. A plumber has his toolbox of plumbing tools. The carpenter has his tool belt. But the web designer has a USB drive of much needed essentials.
USB drives are super handy and since they are getting cheaper and cheaper, it’s well worth the $20 investment for a 2GB drive. Need a portable and easy backup of your client’s sites? Put it on the drive!
Here is a list of much needed essentials you should have on your drive:
- Wordpress 2.6
- Drupal 6.2
- Joomla 1.5.3
- GSiteCrawler
- Muliple IE
- CamStudio 2.5
Content Management
Need a CMS for a client, you’ve got three great choices. You will never know when one is needed more than the other.
Sitemaps
With GSiteCrawler, you can crawl your website to create a Google Sitemap, a list of all the URLs on your site and even find bad links.
Quality Control
Cross-browser testing can be a pain. Thankfully, there is Multiple IE which allows you to test your site in different versions of Internet Explorer.
Client Training
Need to provide some training to your staff or your clients? How about screen capture software? Try CamStudio.
So there you have it, as I find more free and new tools to add to my drive, I will let you know. Do you know of any that you cannot live without?
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black cats
August 7th, 2008 at 9:09 pm
I agree, USB drives are amazing. Especially when your on the go between your laptop and your home computer. For doing things at work, they do wonders here as well.
Any web designer may also consider looking into portable versions of both Photoshop CS3 and Dreamweaver CS3, although they do exist, though they are somewhat hard to find. Also these are for quick edits only, any real web design shouldn’t be done portably in my opinion.
Allan
August 8th, 2008 at 3:52 am
@black cats – I considered adding the portable CS3 versions to the list, but I believe you could run into some legality issues there.
Otooo
August 8th, 2008 at 11:22 pm
Heheh, I have the same USB as the one in the pic (Transcend)
Allan
August 9th, 2008 at 9:30 am
@Otooo – What kinds of things do you have on yours?
Web Hosting
October 3rd, 2008 at 11:16 am
Interesting tool kit indeed! covers all the aspects of web designing. Thank you for the wonderful post!