There are many reasons why you may want to put up a website possibly it’s because you want to sell something online or engage in content creation and marketing or perhaps you are trying to build a brand or set up a charity. Whatever it is, having a website is one of the first steps to take when building a digital presence and with the internet slowly becoming crowded it is easy to get lost when your website has a dull colorless design.
Web development tools are pretty much different from website builders such as Wix, Weebly, square space and IDEs (integrated development environment). These tools are not drag and drop editors, they are tools that enable the designer to test, edit and debug the code simultaneously and with the rate at which website builders are quickly gaining popularity, it is easy to forget that people still build websites the old-fashioned way.
Looking at the future it may not be farfetched to say that these web builders may well take over the market but as it stands now, if you still value some good old web development tools then this may just be what you need to put out a website of your own.
Here are five web development tools you will need to put up a cutting-edge website of your own;
- Sublime text
The very first thing you will need is a decent editor, where you can write and edit code in a solidly built platform. Sublime text does just that and more. There are quite a handful of editors out there but we recommend Sublime text for the following reasons;
- Very helpful keyboard shortcuts
- Great prediction and text completion
- Numerous plugins that make writing extensions easy
- simultaneous editing
- Web developer tools
Most major browsers such as chrome, Mozilla, and Safari come with their very own web developer tools that are inbuilt. They don’t require any separate extensions or downloads. these tools enable you to edit your code while debugging them in real time, they can be really helpful when you hit a brick wall and can determine what the root cause of the bug is. A little debugging would come in handy.
- GitHub
Have you ever showed up for an interview and you were asked to showcase your previous work? You hand over your thumb drive thinking you moved your projects over the previous night. And it hit you, you totally forgot! But it’s too late, the thumb drive is already plugged in and the interviewer is trying to find your absent project. Discovering its empty he looks at you and you start to roll your eyes, you just blew it. Well don’t get too depressed, that would never happen to you once we introduce you to GitHub and the wonderful world of repositories. With GitHub, you can share every revision of your code and never again will you roll your eyes in front of an interviewer. Lol. GitHub also offers you great collaboration features where you can work in groups and participate in open source projects, with some good documentation every step of the way.
- Canva/Photoshop/sketch
Web development company – Lilo said to us that websites are not made of code only, they contain images logos infographics and various design elements. So, consider these tools as your little design toolkit. Having a great photo editing tool and a mockup creator is one powerful tool you will need when crafting a website of your own and is something you always want to have up your sleeves. Mockups are a great way to make the development process easier as you can plan out your coding steps right from the beginning without having to overthink it. Logos and images beautify the webpage and infographics inform and beautify at the same time.
- Stack Overflow
Consider this the holy grail of web development communities, there is a saying that goes nothing in the world is new, well nothing in the world of web development is new because it can be found on stack overflow. Stack overflow is a powerhouse for web solutions. It is a community of developers willing to share knowledge, answer questions, and help each other on the journey of developing, especially if you are a newbie when it comes to web development. This is a tool you want to always consort when you are stuck debugging a block of code to no avail.
Well, those are our top five web development tools that will always come in handy. Here are Some honorable mentions worthy of note;
- Google web developers’ group: this is another web development community that can also be of help when developing a website of your own.
- Collaboration tools such as; Slack (this is a collaboration tools that help to connect you with other likeminded people, where you can work in teams, groups to get work done, it also allows you to chat and send messages, share code snippets and useful resources with your team members.), Trello, Microsoft teams.
- CSS Preprocessors such as SASS
- JavaScript libraries such as; JQuery, BackboneJS.
