Over the years, my toolbox for web design has evolved numerous times. I’ve had the unfortunate luck of having to work with Microsoft FrontPage. I’ve also used just about everything, from the Windows Notepad to Macromedia (and Adobe) DreamWeaver. Who knows what I’ll be using further down the road, but for the time being I find the following to be invaluable tools for the work I’m currently doing.
To give this some context: I’m developing using PHP and MySQL on a windows machine for publishing on a FreeBSD server. My main development environment is Zend Studio, which has it’s quirks, but is great overall.
Support software:
CuteFTP - It’s not quite as friendly as Transmit on OSX, but it’s good for what is. I like being able to edit right in the browser, that’s a nice feature for quick edits or just to see what’s there.
PuTTY - Free SSH client so I can get onto our dev server.
NotePad2 - Drop in replacement for Windows Notepad that does syntax highlighting. You’ll never touch notepad again…
RegexBuddy - Awesome program for doing regular expression testing. This will save you tons of time if you have to write long/complicated regex searches, such as for screen scrapes.
I use Firefox for testing and development and go back to IE later to make sure it works. This sometimes lands me in hot water, but the extensions for Firefox just make it too good to do otherwise. Here are the most useful extensions I have. If you use any that aren’t on this list that you find invaluable in your work, feel free to leave a comment letting me know.
Extensions:
CoLT - Adds “Copy Link Text” item to browser’s context menu.
Console^2 - Extra features on error console.
Firebug - Invaluable debugging tool (CSS/HTML/Javascript).
IE Tab - Render tabs using IE engine.
Live HTTP Headers - view header information.
Professor X - View page head source, nicely formatted.
Tamper Data - View/Modify headers and requests.
Web Developer - Tons of useful dev tools in a toolbar.
X-Ray - View source inline with display.
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