Web Designing Tools

Web designing has direct link to visual aspect of a web site. Effective web design is necessary to communicate ideas effectively.

Web desinging is subset of web development. However these terms are used interchangeably.

Key Points

Design Plan should include the following:

·        Details about information architecture.

·        Planned structure of site.

·        A site map of pages

Wireframe

Wireframe refers to a visual guide to appearance of web pages. It helps to define structre of web site, linking between web pages and layout of visual elements.

Following things are included in a wireframe:

·        Boxes of primary graphical elements

·        Placement of headlines and sub headings

·        Simple layout structure

·        Calls to action

·        Text blocks

Wireframe can be created using program like Visio but you can also use a pen and paper.

Web Designing Tools

Here is the list of tools that can be used to make effective web designs:

Coda 2
Coda 2 is a powerful web development & designing tool, comes with better user interface, text editing, file management, clips, sites, design and better Mysql support. OmniGraffle
OmmniGraffle is mainly used for wireframing. The downside of this tool is that It doesnot have interactive prototyping and It is available only for Mac.Pen and Paper
Pen and paper can be used to draw the appearance of the how the web site will look like.Vim
Vim is great web desiging tool.It supports full customizable auto-intending of code, multiple buffers for storing cut/copied code, and recording of actions for automated repetition.

S.N.	Tool Description
1.	Photoshop CC This is a great web designing tool provided by Adobe. The latest Photoshop CC 2014 supports many new features such as smart objects, layer comps, smart guides, Typekit integration, font search, and workflow enhancements.
2.	Illustrator CC Illustrator CC is also a web designing tool comes with powerful features like AutoCad libraries, white overprint, fill and stroke proxy swap for text, automatic corner generation, unembed images and touch type tools etc.
3.	Sublime Text Sublime Text is a source code editor with Python application programming interface. It's functionality can be extended using plugins.
4.	Imageoptim It is basically used for optimizing images on a website in order to load them faster by finding best compression parameters and by removing unnecessary comments.
5.	Sketch 3 Sketch 3 is a web desiging tool developed specifically for designing interfaces, websites, icons etc.
6.	Heroku It is also a great web development tool which supports Ruby, Node.js, Python, java and PHP.
7.	Axure It supports prototyping, documentation, and wireframing tools for making interactive website design.
8.	Hype 2 The Hype 2 offers: Easiest way to Animate & add interactivity, Hardness the power of HTML5, Mobile responsiveness, and WYSIWYG features.
9.	Image Alpha This tool helps to reduce file sizes of 24-bit PNG files. It does so by applying lossy compression and convert it to PNG8+alpha format which more efficient.
10.	Hammer This tool is suitable for non programmers and good only for small projects.
11.	JPEGmini Lite It is an image optimizing tool and supports photos in any resolution up to 28 Megapixels.
12.	BugHerd This tool helps to see how the projects is going and what everyone is working on. It also helps to identify issues in development.