The website is key to all digital marketing efforts regardless of whether paid ads are being run, emails are being sent, or social media postings are happening. All marketing materials lead users right to one place, the website. It hence proves that web development teams have their role to play in this regard too.
Web development involves website creation using both the front and back ends. Ranging from setting up the first code to design perfection and tweaking, creating a functional, pleasing and user friendly website is something each business, brand and company must do.
Yet web development can become complicated especially if business owners are not familiar with it. Even web developers need web development tools to help ensure that the process runs quite smoothly. Let us now have a look at web development tools and which ones are best for the task at hand.
Web development tools – what are they?
Web developer tools are commonly referred to as DevTools. They are software helping web developers create, test and debug code for websites and web apps during development.
Professionals can use these technologies to help examine user experience of websites and web apps. However these resources are not necessarily useful in making an app or a website, they are useful in helping evaluate its security and aesthetics as well as making unique elements for websites.
These tools can work as either native capabilities, or browser add-ons. They are also available to web designers so they can make the needed tweakings and changes. Moreover, web development has two sides namely front-end and back-end web development.
Front-end and back-end web development – an overview
When it comes to learning about web development’s tools, it is also helpful to learn the difference between two kinds of web development i.e. front-end and back-end development.
Front-end web development looks after creation of interface and functions that users engage in, engage with and observe. Front-end developers face clients and work their way around the website or web app’s visual aspects which users see, observe, and interact with.
On the other hand, back-end development is where the website’s hosting and server end works are conducted (plus cyber security and other online protection tasks). This aspect is not seen or observed by users.
Web development tools – Some of the best free and paid ones to know about
Professionals from a well known web design company Dubai have decided to provide a list of potential considerations for web development professionals to have a look at, when deciding which web development tool to utilize in creating bespoke websites, web apps, or both.
HubSpot Content Management System (CMS)
HubSpot’s content management system (CMS) integrates website creation with one of the best customer relationship management (CRM) platforms which help personalize the complete buyer journey. This further aids in improving the alignment of sales and marketing objectives, plus the provision of spot-on closed-loop data.
Businesses, brands and companies alike invest in CMS hub to help their marketing teams make engaging digital experiences for customers and for raising revenue too. Moreover, HubSpot’s CMS is quite popular due to the following factors:
- Controlled Safety: HubSpot CMS removes worries of website safety. It helps marketing teams concentrate on expanding business online. HubSpot’s very own cyber security experts are watching the website and protecting it properly.
- A well managed CMS: CMS hub also helps in website hosting, maintenance or security because most of the tools are free. Hence there is no need to learn using cPanel or worry about availability of servers.
- A drag & drop editor: HubSpot CMS hubs also provides a code-free content editor helping both web developers and marketers in editing and adjusting content as per the audience’s needs. This also helps them provide websites visitors the best possible user experience thanks to the its intuitive design.
GitHub
At times, developers come under pressure when they are working on adding new features to a website/web app development project (or working on a new one) and they make an error (or two). This is where version control systems (VCS) of GitHub come into play.
It helps web developers and marketing teams observe any changes made, or have a look back at the previous state (to see what kind of errors were made). There are numerous reasons GitHub is best for web developers.
GitHub also provides repository hosting service which also has a rich community of open-source developers (making collaboration between teams much easy). It even helps in providing other key components, like bug tracking, feature requests, task management and mini wikis for each project.
A lot of employers often look for weeb developers having fine tuned Git skills and such developers can help other developers learn about GitHub. Moreover, GitHub can help developers learn about open-source projects. But for that, difference between the tool and Git needs to be understood by web developers.
Microsoft’s Visual Studio Code
Alternatively known as VS Code, Microsoft’s Visual Studio Code is a free and open-source code editing tool. Its marketplace provides a wide array of paid and open source extensions plus packages. They can be downloaded to extend the tool’s functionality. Moreover, the underlying code editor can be changed to help suit individual needs.
Though a lot of professionals wish to avoid coding because they are worried that they might make a mistake, knowledge of changing code directly is quite a useful skill to have aty any point during the web design and development process.
Web developers should have coding knowledge. It can help them modify the source code of a software extension already existing to add the desired functionality to the website. Having a specialized platform lioke MS Visual Studio Work to do much of web development work automatically helps reduce the burden.
The web development tool also has a debugger and terminal built in plus linting and support for a wide array of source control systems. It has strong support for JavaScript and Python making a viable option for front-end web development and some back end development functionalities too.
Syntactically Awesome Stylesheet (SASS)
SASS is the abbreviation for Syntactically Awesome Stylesheet, which is a Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) precompiler. CSS is among the three core front-end web development languages which helps structure the website’s layout along with the style elements on it like fonts, buttons and color schemes.
CSS Coding is known to be repetitive and time consuming and this is why SASS was developed to help solve the issue by simplifying the process of website styling and cutting repetition.
Also, a wide array of CSS precompuilers are now available. Yet, SASS is the first one among many and it is a pionerring tool. First released in 2006, it has maintained its popularity thanks to the features it has added to CSS (such as mixins, variables, inheritance, imports, nested rules and key in-built functions).
Today, SASS is still a well-known trusted, robust and well-supported CSS precompiuler in the market. It is an essential tool for Front End Web Development.
Bootstrap
Bootstrap is a free and open source CSS framework (which helps create responsive websites). It helps make front-end development faster and much easier by allowing movbile responsiveness, components, along with plug-ins. At first, developers at Twitter created Bootstrap for use in internal development processes.
Eventually the platform became an open source one and a lot of professionals started utilizing it to make user friendly websites and web apps. Moreover, developers have used to normalize stylesheets, create model objects, add JavaScript plugins and the like in web development. Bootstrap has design templates based on CSS and HTML plus typography, image carousel, slides, forms, buttons, tables, navigation, and the like.
Moreover, it also has a useful library of icons, responsive grid system, provides support for JavaScript plugins, a wide list of components, and responsive CSS filters for tablets, smartphones, laptops and desktops. Bootstrap is compatible with all the latest browsers, and is a free plus open-source tool.
Over To You
These are the tools which are best for use in web development, at both the front and at the back too. The list may seem to be selective but is definitely worth considering and giving a try in most web development tasks.