Liam Lagan

7 Tools I Use To Make Websites In 2018.

One of the things that surprised me when I started learning web development was that most of the tools you need to succeed are completely free (or very reasonably priced). This is a list of my current favourites;


Atom – A cool text editor with lots of helpful features and plugins.

Emmet – An invaluable plugin for Atom that enables you to write code in shorthand, which you can expand into a fully compliant line of code by hitting TAB. After investing even a short amount of time in learning the basics of Emmet I found myself spending less time hunting for the correct bracket key on my keyboard, and getting ideas down in double time.

Github - It keeps your code safe and secure in the cloud and keeps a lovely record of all your mistakes in case you need reminding of them later. At first I found using Git in the console a daunting way to learn the concepts of version control so Github.com was invaluable. The desktop apps also made switching between my PC and Macbook a piece of cake.

Chrome Developer Tools – Google wants everyone to use their browser. And giving developers great free tools to do their job with seems like a very smart way to make that happen.

Pesticide – A plugin for the Chrome browser that draws coloured borders around every element on the page to help identify layout problems. It's always there and takes one click to activate on any page which can sometimes be even faster than using the dev tools.

Filezilla – The FTP software I use to get work from my computer to my web server.

Google Fonts - An intuitive library of free-to-use fonts curated by google. The advantage of using a collection like Google Fonts is that all of the fonts are available under open-source licenses allowing free use in personal and commercial projects.

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