We use these website design tools pretty much every day and are happy to pass on our knowledge of them to you.
1. 960 Grid System
The 960 Grid System is an effort to streamline web development workflow by providing commonly used dimensions, based on a width of 960 pixels. There are two variants: 12 and 16 columns, which can be used separately or in tandem.
The premise of the system is ideally suited to rapid prototyping, but it would work equally well when integrated into a production environment. There are printable sketch sheets, design layouts, and a CSS file that have identical measurements.
2. Color Schemer Studio 2
ColorSchemer Studio 2 is a professional color-matching application that will help you build beautiful color schemes quickly and easily.
Use ColorSchemer Studio to identify color harmonies for the web (RGB) or print (CMYK), create palettes from photos, search thousands of existing color schemes, mix colors, create gradient blends, and much more.
3. Creattica
This is our choice of the many design inspiration galleries that are out there. View, rate and become inspired by the thousands of user uploaded logos, CSS layouts, business cards and Photoshop work on display.
4. Smashing Magazine
A treasure trove of great articles, how-to features, free graphics and icon downloads all presented in a super clean and intuitive presentation.
5. MyFonts
Use the world’s largest collection of fonts to find fonts for your project, identify fonts you’ve seen with the amazing What The Font? tool. The site offers flawless tools to try fonts before you buy them and organize the fonts you like.
6. Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a free service offered by Google that generates detailed statistics about the visitors to a website. Its main highlight is that the product is aimed at marketers as opposed to webmasters and technologists from which the industry of web analytics originally grew. It is the most widely used website statistics service, currently in use at around 57% of the 10,000 most popular websites.
Google Analytics can track visitors from all referrers, including search engines, display advertising, pay-per-click networks, email marketing and digital collateral such as links within PDF documents.
7. ActiveDen
There is an argument that Flash is on it’s way out, but we feel definitely still has a time and a place where it can be useful and fun. For example, here. ActiveDen is world’s largest community of Flash based authors and buyers.
8. iStockPhoto
What began as a humble stock photography community has blossomed – in large part due to it’s purchase by the powerhouse Getty – into an amazing site where you can buy a placeholder image for a buck and high res images for about $10.
They have also launched the Vetta collection, which features images that go beyond the normal stock quality parameters, without astronomical pricing. We used one such Vetta image for our Join The Team page.
9. Adobe Creative Suite 4
Yes Adobe has a stranglehold over all things creative, and yes their products are priced so aggressively that when a new version is rolled out the geeks go into hiding to crack it, but ask yourself this: can you imagine a world without Photoshop or Illustrator? No, you could not.
http://adobe.com/CreativeSuite4
10. Coda
So, we code web sites by hand. And one day, it hit us: our web workflow was wonky. We’d have our text editor open, with Transmit open to save files to the server. We’d be previewing in Safari, adjusting SQL in a Terminal, using a CSS editor and reading references on the web. “This could be easier,” we declared. “And much cooler.”
And so introduced was Coda…
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