Top Five Web Design Tools
Just like in most other professions, a web designer’s set of tools is what brings a concept into fruition. There are many applications available to our disposal, but there are some that just stand out from the crowd. The tools in this article are what’s regarded as the most popular tools used for web design. Last week, you were asked to vote on what you thought was the best web design tool. Close to 280 of you shared your opinion on what the best web design tool is.
In this article, you’ll find the five web design tools that garnered the most votes.
1. Firebug
Firebug is a free, open source in-browser web development tool for the Firefox web browser. It’s many features include: on-the-fly HTML and CSS editing for tweaking or debugging, a Console for logging, analyzing and debugging JavaScript, and an intuitive Document Object Model (DOM) inspection tool to help you quickly see how the elements of a web page relates to one another.
2. Photoshop
Adobe Photoshop is a very popular commercial graphics editor available for the Mac and Windows operating system. Created for professional photographers and designers, it is the ideal application for manipulating images and creating web graphics. Photoshop has all the necessary tools and options you need such as: Filters – which automatically adds effects to your image or a selected section of your image, extensibility and automation with Brushes, Actions and Scripting, and workflow enhancement features like Layer Comps and the Revert option.
3. Panic Coda
Panic Coda is a shareware web development application for the Mac OS X operating system. It seeks to reduce the amount of applications (such as an FTP client, CSS editor, a version control system, etc.) you need to develop websites and to improve your team’s workflow. Coda’s one-window web development philosophy uses a tabbed interface for text editing, file transfers, SVN, CSS, and even “Books” which embeds web books that are searchable (it comes with The Web Programmer’s Desk Referencebut you can add your own).
It’s simple and intuitive interface allowed Coda to garner the Apple Design Awards Best Mac OS X User Experience in 2007.
4. Dreamweaver
Adobe Dreamweaver is a commercial application for web development that’s available for the Mac and Windows operating systems. Its featured-packed suite of tools and options include: syntax highlighting and very smart Code Hinting, a built-in FTP client, project management and workflow options that make team work effortless, and Live View – which shows you a preview of your source code. Dreamweaver tightly integrates with other popular Adobe products such as Photoshop, allowing you to share Smart Objects for quick and easy updating and editing of graphics components.
5. Fireworks
Adobe Fireworks is a commercial raster and vector graphics editor hybrid from Adobe that’s available for the Mac and Windows operating systems. Designed specifically for web designers (unlike Photoshop), Fireworks brings you a plethora of tools and options 
that make full web layout prototyping a breeze.
Among its notable features are: “slices” for slicing and dicing a design mockup into HTML/CSS for rapidly creating prototypes (though you should avoid using auto-generated source code for the end-build), the ability to package an entire site design as a PDF with clickable components for interactive and impressive site prototypes, and optimization tools for making your web graphics as lightweight as possible.
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