The Best Web Development Resources

There are a wide variety of quality free web resources available online

Here we are at the the final stage of our 10 step guide to learning HTML. If you have landed here without having gone through the previous 9 steps you have missed out! Although there is still a treat in store for you here with this list of recommended web resources. These web dev resources have been carefully selected and will be useful to both web design novices as well as web development experts. All the resources, tools and software listed are both easy to use and highly effective and, in my opinion, are the best free resources in their web category/area.

You will find more extensive lists than this but we have tried to weed out the junk and only recommend what we think are the single best and most useful web development resource in each area. Hope you enjoy.


We also recommend browsing www.freedesignstuff.net where they review and rate all the best free design resources from across the web in categories such as web, imagery, fonts, coding and more.

Google Account accounts.google.com/SignUp

Always create a Google account with your website to allow you to use YouTube, Google places, Google maps, Blogger, webmaster tools, Google analytics and more! SEO and tracking the SEO success of your website is only properly possible using the Google webmaster and analytics tools.

Online Photo Editor www.pixlr.com

In order to design a good, visually appealing website you need to use images and graphics and to edit,manipulate and resize these files you will need a Photo Editor. PhotoShop is the best and most renowned but is also very expensive. Pixlr offers a free solution with most of the same tools available in Photoshop.

Offline Photo Editor www.gimpshop.com

There's no question that Adobe Photoshop is excellent image editing software. But for those of us that can't afford up to seven hundred dollars or more to buy it, we now have the same image manipulation power at our fingertips as the high-priced, closed-source programs. In fact, with the release of 2.8, Gimpshop has become preferred software for photo & image editing among more professionals than ever. Layers, channels, masks, filters, levels, advanced pattern matching—the remarkable feature list of Gimp is equal to Photoshop in every way except one: the price.

Copyright Free Images www.pixabay.com

The online image stock exchange is getting larger thanks to great websites like the ones listed who give away quality images for free. You do need to create a free user account but it takes mere seconds and you don't get plagued with junk e-mail after, All they offer is a ridiculously large collection of quality, copyright free images.

Textures and Patterns www.textures.com

Textures.com is a website that offers digital pictures of all sorts of materials. We have pictures of fabrics, wood, metal, bricks, plastic, and many more. These images are called textures and can be used for graphic design, visual effects, in computer games and any other situation where you need a nice pattern or background image. You can download up to 15 images for free every day

RSS Feeds www.rssinclude.com

Integrate information from other websites, your own blog, Facebook, Twitter or YouTube directly into your website in an easily customisable widget.

Slideshows http://flickrit.com

Flickrit is a free slideshow maker that creates online photo slideshows from your Flickr and Instagram photos.

Galleries www.dynamicdrive.com

Dynmaic Drive offers a wide variety of free to use scripts but the most useful are their easy to use slideshows and image galleries. Some samples may not look the best but that is just the small uninteresting images being used.

Online Forms www.jotform.com

Jotform offers hundreds of form templates which can all be modified to suit your needs in terms of both content and style. From basic contact us forms to payment collections forms they have it all covered. you can also create a free user account to track all the form details and usage stats.

Create Favicon Icons www.favicon.cc

Ever wonder what the little image icons in the tab of your browser are called? or how they get there? Well they're called favicons and you can make your own with ease at www.favicon.cc by using their favicon editor or uploading an existing photo or graphic for conversion.

Visitor Comments www.htmlcommentbox.com

The HTML comment box is the simplest way to allows viewers to post comments about your web content on the website itself. Its a useful tools to get immediate feedback on an article and create a discussion place which keeps visitors returning to your website with the hassle of a full blown forum.

Newsletters mailchimp.com

Create automated newsletters for your business/website and allow visitors to signup online using Mail Chimps customisable signup widget. Users who sign up get added to your online database and once you create and send an e-mail or online newsletter it automatically gets sent to them all.

Code Validator validator.w3.org

Once you think you are finished the website or if you are just having trouble with an aspect of your web code you can use this validator. You can submit code as a file, as text or from a url and each time the code is checked and all errors are noted. Better still however - you can set an option to repair all code errors fro you too! Cool or what.

FTP filezilla-project.org

Filezilla is an open-source (GNU GPL) FTP client for Windows, Mac OS X and GNU/Linux. The Site contains a documentation wiki and a forum to help you get up to speed with using the software but to be honest it's pretty easy to use anyway.

Social Media Sharing www.addthis.com

Allow users to share your website info/articles with friends through social sites.

Converting Files www.online-convert.com

This free online file converter lets you convert media easy and fast from one format to another. We support a lot of different source formats, just try.

Website Templates 

We, along with our partners at Free Design Resources, have scoured the internet to create our very own list of where to get the best free web design templates. Huge collections of premium and free website templates across a range of web development platforms.

That concludes our list of recommended list of online web design and development resources but I will finish with an important reminder that one of the very best resources to assists you in creating a quality website is, and always will be, the web design process.

If you know of any more then please contact us via the form below and we might include them in our next list.