13 Must Have Tools For Webmasters

When I built my first site I had a friend that helped me out a whole lot. Talk about being a noob, well I was king of the noobs. He helped me set the site up (Open Road Biker), then he helped me again when I crashed it the next day. At the same time he was also sending me links to various tool to use. Most of those tools were godsends. I still use all of the tools that he recommended to me except a few. Well since then I have added a whole lot of programs to my collection and I think I have almost the perfect mix of free webmaster tools. So if you are new to blogging or building websites then pay attention, there are some great and powerful tools here for you to use. Some are easy, others have a little bit harder of a learning curve but they are all worth trying out.

Firefox
Yep, Firefox is a tool in itself. There are so many plugins for it that they make Firefox a must have tool even without the great built in spell checker. The day I started using Firefox was the end of my IE experience.

Here are a few of the plugins to make it great;

• Search Status This tool allows you to see the page rank and Alexa ranking, it will highlight no follow links and a long list of other things that a webmaster may find helpful.
• ColorZilla This is a great little plugin designed to allow you to figure out what colors you are looking at. It gives you the hex and RGB values. It comes in real handy while trying to figure out what code a certain color is when designing your site.
• FireFTP I will talk about two FTP programs in this article. This one is a plugin for Firefox that I have found very useful. It opens in another tab while your browser is open that way you don’t have to keep switching from Firefox to your FTP program. It may save a little time for you in the long run.
• Web Developer Just what it sounds like. It has a variety of tools to help you with your website. Some of the most useful tools are the validation tools. They will help you point out errors in you CSS and XHTML.
• MeasureIt This is a cool little tool designed to let you measure aspects of web pages.
• FireShot This is a nice little screen shot tool. It has come in very handy for me here lately.

The rest of these are stand alone programs that handle a varity of tasks. Most of these you will find very useful.

• HTML-Kit This is a great web editor. It has so many tools that I still haven’t figured out what to do with all of them.
• FileZilla This was the first FTP program that I used and until I started using Fire FTP it was the only one that I used. It may be a little faster than Fire FTP but I haven’t really tested the speeds.
• IrfanView This is one of the most valuable picture editor programs that I have used. It is also very simple to use. The only problem is that it’s not very feature rich.
• GIMP This is a feature rich image tool. Think Photoshop but free. The only problem here is that it has a rather steep learning curve but when you compare it to the price of Photoshop then it is more than worth it plus you can find tutorials.
• Open Office Can’t afford M$ Office? Try Open Office, I mean what do you have to lose, it’s free and a good office suite.

• Thunderbird Last but not least is a great email application. Why continually log in to your gmail account and waste precious time that you could be using working on that blog you have when Thunderbird will retrieve your emails automatically while you do other stuff.

There you have it, a load of great programs that you can use for your website. The great thing is that all of them are free. They all have varying degrees of difficulty but you should be able to find tutorials for all of them to help you figure out how to use them. Go ahead and try them out and tell me which ones you like the best. Do you use a free tool that isn’t listed here? Well use the comments to tell me about it.