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17 Websites that all web designers and developers should know
Every designer has their own set of websites and tools that they prefer. Having a toolkit can help you design and build your project faster and it also helps with the preparation of a design project by giving you a starting point for research. From fonts to backgrounds and code snippets to browser testing, here is an essential list of websites that all designers and developers should have in their list.
Colour Lovers is a community of people who share colours, pallettes and patterns.
This is a great website to get yourself some fresh ideas about what colors to use in your designs.
Dribbble is a community of designers who like to share what they are currently working on.
Right now its invite only, so cross your fingers this opens up!
Flikode is a code snippet bookmarking website where you can find bits of code in any language. It also has a help and discussion section so you can have some community support.
My Lovely Charts is a great online app that lets you well…create charts. I find it useful to make site-maps and other layout diagrams.
Color Combos is a simple website where you can view and test how colors look together. Simple to use and with a huge library of color combinations this is a great addition to your web toolkit.
http://new.myfonts.com/WhatTheFont
Ever wonder what font is being used in an image? Or have you been supplied with a logo to recreate but no fonts? What The Font is your saviour. Just upload your image and it will try and detect what font is used.
A simple way to create a favicon. Just upload your image and it will generate an ico file for you.
Or you can try your hand at using their editor.
http://www.stripegenerator.com
Stripe generator is a simple way to create tile background stripes of any style for your website. This is a real time saver! They also have a library of user generated stripes.
If you are ever needing a loading GIFfor you ajax application then look no further. Ajax Load has a good library of loaders in different shapes. You can also set the color that you need the loader to be in. Fast and handy!
BG Patterns is exactly as the name suggests. It has a library of patters that can be used for background images.
Browser Shots is a great tool to test your website in a lot of browser conditions. Simple to use and with great results, just select the browsers you want to test against and enter you domain name. The results usually take about 30 minutes to display.
SXC is a community driven image stock exchange. Most of these images are free to use and are high resolution.
When you are pitching to a client it’s handy to have dummy content. A good standard is to use lipsum text. At lipsum.com you can quickly generate as many paragraphs of text to suite your project.
If you want your website to be 100% web standard, then run it through the W3C validator. You can also find CSS and RSS validators on their website. It gives detailed responses to errors in your markup.
Pingdom offers a page load timer and breakdown of the files that are called from your website as it loads. At its simplest form, it gives some great insight into how your page loads and where you might have a bottleneck file that is holding things up.
DaFont is the number 1 place to find fonts. With a great categorisation system and the ability to type in your own text to see the result, this is the perfect font website for designers.
Mock Flow is one of the easiest online wire-framing services around. When you need to draft a layout quickly and that is visually pleasing to the eye, then don’t go past this website. It will be a great asset to your toolkit.
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