Top 5 Design Tools For Your Next Web Designing Projects.
No doubt, website designing may be more cumbersome, time consuming and difficult. Fortunately, there are a number of software tools that could make the task much easier. Professional web designer writes in programming codes, but sometimes, they employ the services of the web design software.
Software tools makes web design looks easier, saves time and yield better results.
Nowadays, it doesn’t really matter if you an expert or not before you can construct something online you can call your own website. A lot of WYSIWYG (What you see is what you get) web design program can guide you to completely build your own website from scratch without attending an InfoTech college, even though with the availability of the WYSIWYG guides, it is very wise idea for you to have basic skills on programming.
There are a lot of web design tools available but we will be looking at few of them and how they fit into individual skills. In my article today, I’ll be listing very few that I have come across over the course of my web development journey till date that you can bank on for effective results.
List below are great website design tools for experts and newbies to take advantage of:
Table of Contents
Great Website Design Tools for everyone
Adobe Dreamweaver
Dreamweaver is a great web design tool from Adobe; it is the best choice for the expert and averagely professional website designers. It goes beyond an ordinary HTML editor; it fully integrates coding tools and visual design. Besides those great features, it supports a wide array of scripting languages such as; PHP, CSS and ASP.
Dreamweaver gives you full control during the design process; it offers the best customization properties and includes features such as roll over images, collapsible panels, fluid grid layouts, drop down menus and simple apps for mobile devices.
Courtesy of the advanced WYSIWYG capabilities, designing a simple website with the Adobe software is pretty easy; it will help you out with the HTML code, so you need not to worry to become a coding whiz to design a website.
Adobe made the Dreamweaver to be a hybrid editing tool, so if you are already grounded in coding, you can work using the dual panel taking advantage of the WYSIWYG and hand-coding alongside. Coding experts can exclusively work on the code and later switch to see the final product. Dreamweaver allows incorporation of a number of plug-in which even make web design easier.
Microsoft Expressions Web
The Microsoft web design product is also great, it features and hybrid editing like the Dreamweaver in a dual-panel setting for the simultaneous hand coding and WYSIWYG system. Expressions Web is packed with built in templates making web design much easier.
This tool is barely good enough for beginners, as it lacks drawing or drag and drop positioning tools. You need the basics of Web development before you can make use of Microsoft Expression Web.
One reason why developers recommend Expression web is because of its SEO features which makes it easy for search engine bots to crawl your site and improve your search engine rankings.
Coda 2
The first launch of Coda was in 2007, and updated later in 2012. It is web design software exclusively for Mac. Coda is a “One window web design” meaning you can’t switch between apps or programs during the design process. The core web design tools is placed on a facility called the “super sidebar”.
For real, Coda cannot compare to Dreamweaver in terms of features, but it does offer a top-notch HTML and CSS coding environment which includes; debugging, code hinting, and validation. It has a special CSS authoring tool which allows web designers to control their style sheets from inside a visual interface.
Amaya
When you are looking for a first class open source free web authoring tools, Amaya offers its best WYSIWYG program on Windows, Mac and Linux. The software was first launched in 1996 and updated last around January 2012. Beginners without any coding experience could easily play around with this tool and it also supports HTML, CSS and XML.
Bluefish
Just like Amaya, Bluefish is also a free, open source text editor; it extends its own compatibility from Windows, Mac and Linux to Solaris and Mac OS X.
Bluefish is the mother of versatility and flexibility in the web design industry, webmaster can develop in HTML, XHTML, CSS, XML, PHP, C, C++, Java, JavaScript, Vala, D, Ada, Google Go, Python, Shell, Ruby, SQL, and JSP among others. Unfortunately, you need to know how to code because it does not offer WYSIWYG.
I can boldly say Bluefish is one of the best web design software out there and usually used to generate dynamic web design. It is a great utility for mobile web design, a trend which continues to increase on daily basis.
Google Web Designer
The latest entrant into my list of web design tools you can use for your next or upcoming web development projects is the newly introduced Google Web Designer. The tool lets you create astonishing and nicely looking website with click of your mouse. You have all you need at your disposal for a clean and perfect output.
I love this tool, it looks promising with its layout and interface. Although, I’m yet to crack the code of using it to the best of my abilities, but I still think I can master that in few days if I’m really interested in using it for my next WYSIWYG (including HTML, CSS, XML based projects). However, if you’re not interested in building your website from scratch, but want something less stressful, then consider HTML Templates by MotoCMS, the guys there offer some wide range of awesome templates for your needs.
What are other helpful tools you’ve come across online that you’d love us to check out? Please share the name and if possible, the direct download link so we could check them out for our readers’ benefits.