Favorite Web Design Tools

This is a collection of the tools I use – most of them daily – for producing websites, including HTML creation, scripting, graphics design, and FTP. I hope you’ll find this list useful.

The Fontz ($12) – Anyone doing graphic design or otherwise working with choosing fonts for a project will appreciate this nifty tool – it displays any word or phrase using all of your fonts in a simple list so you can quickly scan down through them and decide which font looks best for the project. I use this one all the time to get just the right look for whatever I’m working on.

Transmit ($30) – this is a great FTP application with a lot of features including a tabbed interface for multiple concurrent sessions, easy editing of remote files, and the ability to automatically detect your server’s time zone for synchronization, plus a lot more. Everyone has their own personal preferences when it comes to FTP, and I’ve tried many FTP apps out there – I personally like Transmit the best. Has a Dashboard Widget too – great for a quick drag-n-drop upload.

Spam Stopper (free) – Amongst the number of nifty utilities produced by RailHead Designs, Spam Stopper is one I use all the time. A clean simple little tool that converts email addresses into a format unreadable by spam-bots so you can use them in your webpages without worrying about the consequences of getting spammed. Spam Stopper creates the link to send email and can embed a subject line as well if you wish. No more need to use graphics that could get blocked, or to spell out the address (“joe-at-something-dot-com”) that could get misspelled when someone tries to type it into their email program.

MacLorem (free, donateware) – Need a little bit of Lorem Ipsum to fill out a mock up? MacLorem is a great tool for this – create as many or as few paragraphs as you need, with a lot of nice customizations available from the Preferences menu. It will even let you create random text using vocabulary from fifteen different languages if Latin isn’t your thing.

Free Ruler (free, donateware) – Great for calculating the dimensions of an object using pixels, inches, centimeters, or picas.

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