Web designers are faced with many tasks. In the early days, a web designer was forced to code the entire site by hand. Later, web design applications made this task easier, by providing a user friendly interface, much like a graphics application. Today, the web designer does not necessarily have to do any coding. This frees up time to do more design work, choosing colors, images and optimizing content.
Blogs
The free blogging platforms provide the most tools to make web designing easier. While they can be used just for blogging, most platforms, such as Blogger or WordPress can be modified to create many different types of websites. One advantage to using these tools is that the website owner or content creator can easily update the site using the user friendly interface. For the web designer, the advantage is the number of widgets available for different types of content. Finally, many templates are available for blogging platforms, taking even more work off of the web designer. If you take advantage of WordPress I highly recommend that you skip the free hosted version and set it up with one of the many blog hosting providers out there.
Graphics Tools
Even if you have a graphic design degree manipulating graphics for a website can be time consuming and tedious. Online tools can help with image optimization, a necessary task for all images. These tools accept common graphics file types and modify them to make the file size smaller, for faster loading of the website. Finally, font matchers take an image found online, analyze it and report what font was likely used to create the image. This is useful when you have an example site provided by the client and you need to replicate some elements.
Utilities
Many online utilities exist for today’s web designer. One useful utility is the cross browser checker. It is wise to make sure that the site displays as intended on all of the browsers in use. This list of browsers includes those used on Windows, Mac and handheld devices. Another useful online tool is the link checker. After designing a site, periodically the links should be checked to make sure they are still valid. Online link checkers perform this task for the designer and produce a report.
Today’s web designer has many tools available to make the job faster and easier to complete. From building entire sites using blogging platforms to performing website testing, online tools help the web designer provide the best product to the client.