Here at Ctrl Alt Create our team have a selection of tools they use to help with the web design and development process. Here are 5 of our favourite:
Font Awesome
One of the most popular web design tools, here at Ctrl Alt Create, is Font Awesome. Font Awesome is a toolkit of fonts and icons that is based on CSS and LESS. The Font Awesome toolkit allows our developers to easily insert scalable vector icons that can be customised in seconds. The icons colour, size and shadow can all be customised with simple CSS. All the icons are SVG’s (scalable vector graphics) meaning they will look good no matter how big they are. At present the icon library has 675 icons, with this number growing all the time.
Brackets
Our teams text editor of choice is Brackets. Brackets is a modern, open source text/code editor that understands web design. The code/text editor was created from scratch for web designers and front end developers. What our team likes the most about brackets is the real-time connection between the editor and browser. This means you can make changes to HTML and CSS and see the changes instantly.
SEO Type Tool
When we finish the web design process we ensure that the website is correctly optimised for search engines. One way we do this is by ensuring the length of meta titles and descriptions are correct, to ensure they are not cut short on Google. To make sure the meta titles and descriptions are the correct length we use a ‘type tool’. You can find and use this type tool here.
Favicon Generator
Another tool that makes our web design teams life much easier is the ‘real favicon generator’ tool. A favicon is a short cut icon/bookmark icon that is associated with a website. You can see these in your browsers website tabs. With so many different platforms and icon sizes now in use it can be a time-consuming task creating them all. However, the ‘real favicon generator’ tool allows you to create favicons and icons that are suitable for all browsers, platforms and technologies in a matter of minutes.
Tiny PNG
Optimising a websites images is crucial to ensure loading speed is not affected. To make sure the images we use are a reasonable size we use the PNG and JPEG compression tool www.tinypng.com. This tool allows our web design team to optimise images with a perfect balance of image quality and size. Tiny PNG uses smart lossy compression to reduce the size of image files.
Here at Ctrl Alt Create we provide web design services across Wirral & the North West. If you are interested in starting a web design project with us then please send an email to hello@ctrlaltcreate.co or call us on 0793 9006 826.