Some Cool New Web Tools

Last week’s rant about professionalism in Web design was supposed to be a short intro to this post. Basically my point was going to be that the profession of Web design and development has leveled up many times over the last decade, and it looks like some great industry standard practices are starting to settle out. I’m sure we will always be tweaking our workflows and perfecting our tool sets. The trick is to stay on top of the wave. My thanks goes primarily to Snook for helping me stay awake to the industry. Being a project manager has the tendency to lull one to sleep.

Here are some cool tools we’re integrating into our workflow to stay afloat. Not all of them are new, but hopefully this list will be helpful.

## CSS

* SOLID – Applying the 5 basic principles of object-oriented programming and design to CSS for large-scale projects. Study this.
* SMACSS – Scalable and Modular Architecture for CSS. An extremely helpful guide by Jonathan Snook for building maintainable code.
* CSS-Style – A style guide for writing scalable CSS. Combine the knowledge of these top three links for excellence in CSS.
* Inuit – A CSS framework that seeks to apply the above principles.
* Terrific – Still wrapping my head around this one. I know it’s right. Need to figure out how to work with it. Terrific is a front end structuring methodology that increases maintainability and reusability of code. Excellent.

## HTML

* Bootstrap – You’re all using this, right? Will be interesting to see what happens to it now that the creators are moving on.
* Jetstrap – Interface building tool for Bootstrap
* Bootsnipp – Design elements and code snippets to extend Bootstrap. Yay!

## Tools

* Slicy – If I was a photoshop user, this would be a no brainer. :)
* Sublime – Because we haven’t heard from TextMate in awhile :(
* Codekit – Just watch the videos. “It’s like steroids for Web developers.”

## Source Control

* Github – You’re all using Git, right? If not, stop what you are doing immediately and figure it out. Github is a great aid to working with Git.
* DeployHQ – A great link in our workflow, deploying from our repositories to staging and live servers.

I’d love to hear what you’re using!

Comments

3 responses to “Some Cool New Web Tools”

  1. Steven Grant Avatar

    CodeKit is one of those “how did I live without it” tools now. I’ve also started reading Snook’s SMACSS as well, also booked into his workshop in Jan.

  2. Mike Avatar
    Mike

    I’m painfully unaware of a lot of this stuff because I still haven’t really adopted anything like LESS or SASS, and we’re still running SVN. Stuck with what works in a lot of ways. I have to chime in advocating for Sublime though. Get the package control in there and start customizing it. The multiple cursor points alone have saved me hours.

    And if anyone’s not on the Transmit tip, I’d have to recommend Forklift for file transfers. Amazing stuff, really could serve as a Finder replacement as well.

  3. Clark Avatar

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