Most Cost-Effective Tools for Web Development
Web development becomes more relevant every year. What was once a luxury has now become an absolute necessity for any business. This became especially true when the world completely shifted due to the pandemic. More and more companies had to offer e-commerce solutions and provide potential users with all necessary information over the Internet.
For some companies, allocating a significant part of the budget to building a website does not make sense. For others, it is a challenging task. If your business is inclined to save every penny, then you will be glad to know that there are many tools that empower your developers without breaking the bank.
These tools range from frameworks for building websites to image editors, HTML editors, and tools that make the workflow more efficient.
Let's take a look at some of them.
WordPress
When someone mentions WordPress, you probably assume they mean WordPress.com - the hosted version of the platform. But there is another version - self-hosted open source.
Instead of paying for a WordPress.com site upgrade, you can download the source code and host the site on your own servers in a data center. Some third-party hosting providers offer easy WordPress installation (on a purchased domain and hosting) using tools like Softaculous.
In this case, you get a full WordPress installation with all the features of the paid version without spending extra money on third-party hoster services. You can even deploy WordPress as a container, and it will scale to meet any demand.
GIMP
At some point, your web developers will need graphics. No website is complete without images that encourage users to browse sections or buy products. And without bright, professional images, you won't succeed.
Fortunately, you don't need to pay for tools like Photoshop. Instead, you can use GIMP - a powerful open-source image editor with almost all the features of Photoshop.
GIMP can be installed on Linux, macOS, and Windows, and it is very affordable. If you're looking for a way to create great website graphics without spending a lot, check out this application.
Bluefish
Bluefish is a powerful editor aimed at web developers. It handles HTML, CSS, Java, JavaScript, Python, and Ruby excellently. Bluefish can also be used for many other (non-web) languages. But for website programming, Bluefish is an outstanding open-source tool and it's free.
Bluefish can be installed on Linux, macOS, and Windows. And thanks to its very user-friendly interface, your developers will have no trouble learning it. In addition to the usual code editor features, Bluefish supports dialogs and wizards for most HTML tags, an image insertion dialog, thumbnail and link creation, and customizable toolbars.
Angular.js
Angular.js is one of the most popular frameworks used for building single-page web applications. Although this is not traditional web development, most companies have started adopting SPAs due to the large amount of web traffic coming from mobile devices.
Angular.js makes it easy to create SPAs using HTML and JavaScript. And while for some cases using plain HTML is sufficient, developers will need the power of Angular.js to declare dynamic views in web applications.
Like most other tools on this list, Angular.js is free to use (and also open source).
Sass
Sass stands for Syntactically Awesome Style Sheets and is a CSS preprocessor scripting language that compiles into cascading style sheets. Using Sass, your developers can add special features to CSS, such as variables, nested rules, and mixins. This extends the capabilities of CSS, making it more powerful and flexible.
Sass has become the industry standard CSS extension and is used by large companies worldwide. And since Sass has been around for over 15 years, it has a very large developer community.
Moreover, Sass is free and open source.
Chrome DevTools
The Chrome browser includes a very useful developer feature called Chrome DevTools. With it, developers can view and modify things (e.g., CSS) on the fly. Additionally, Chrome DevTools allows:
- Inspect animations
- Identify potential CSS improvements
- Check CSS grid
- Force enable print preview mode
- Log messages
- Run JavaScript directly from the console
- Watch JavaScript values in real-time
- Check network activity
- View, edit, and delete cookies
- View and edit local storage
- View and modify IndexDB data
- View application cache data
The Chrome DevTools toolkit offers so many built-in features that it should be considered a must-have for every developer. And since Chrome is free (and cross-platform), so is DevTools.
GitHub
GitHub is a code repository that also serves as a version control system. Any developer working in a team should consider GitHub a must. Store all your website code in a GitHub repository and grant access to other team members so they can collaborate with you on the project.
GitHub is used by millions of developers worldwide and has become the primary tool for most teams. GitHub can be used for free, unless you want to add special features (such as codespaces, protected branches, and draft pull requests).
At some point, you will need a code repository, and GitHub should be your first choice.
Conclusion
To ensure productive work for web developers, large expenses are not required. Adding any of these tools will help your team and at the same time not exceed the budget. Try these applications and see if they become part of your team's core toolkit.