5 underrated tools for Web Design

If you build websites for a living, you'll undoubtedly use the obvious web design tools - Firebug, Browsershots, plus the various font embedding services and page speed analysers.

So this article isn't about them. Instead it's about the more underrated tools that we use that can help you improve client-side (browser) development and rigorously test everything that you build. Hopefully you'll find something useful in our list of five underrated web design tools.

1. Opera Mobile Emulator

This small program is available for Windows, Mac and Linux. It allows you to test what your web pages will look like in Opera browsers installed on a variety of phones and handheld devices. A less functional, web-based version is also available.

2. Google Rich Snippets Testing Tool

A quick and easy way to check that your web pages are properly marked up with Schema.org metadata.

3. JSLint

JSLint checks JavaScript code against his rather fastidious coding conventions. A less pedantic, and less robust, alternative is available in the form of JSHint 

4. W3Clove

Every designer will be familiar with the W3C's collection of client-side code validation tools. They're extremely useful, but would be more so if they could validate more than one web page at a time.

Enter W3Clove, which taps into the W3C's APIs to conveniently validate the HTML for all web pages on a single domain in one go. Nice.

5. JSFiddle

A great web-based application, which enables you to create JavaScript, HTML and CSS and see the results in real-time. This web design tool is a handy 'playground' and is particularly useful for creating reusable user interface widgets.

Alternatives include JSBin, which is optimised for JavaScript and particularly DOM work. There's also the new Dabblet, which is more oriented to building up CSS style sheets.

You should also take a look at SQL Fiddle for prototyping data schema.