Frontend web development is essential for enhancing a website’s visibility in the digital realm. Frontend web development focuses on improving user engagement, increasing site efficiency, generating ROI, and developing an overall better website look. Because more companies are placing a greater emphasis on this key website responsibility, there are a number of tools on the market that aid in frontend development. The question is, which should your developers use?
Whether you own and operate a web development company, are a contract web developer, or simply want to hone your web development skills, you need the right tools in your arsenal. Keep reading to learn more about the best frontend development tools.
Chrome DevTools
Chrome DevTools is one of the few tools that is built directly into your browser, a fact that makes it all the more appealing. With Chrome DevTools, you can make edits on the fly, diagnose problems in real-time, and debug JavaScript code all while viewing your website and gauging each changes’ performance. If you’re a beginner, DevTools will teach you the fundamentals of web development as well as how to use each of the tool’s features.
Though DevTools is a Chrome feature, you can download it onto both Chrome and Safari browsers. It is important to note that Google makes updates to this tool every six weeks, so you will continually need to update your knowledge along with it, which may not be a bad thing.
GitHub
When you make a mistake in real life, you can apologize and move on or, if you’re lucky enough, use an eraser or the backspace button to undo it. When you make a mistake as a web developer, however, you have to go through lines and lines of code to figure out where the mistake occurred. At least, you did have to do that before GitHub and its version control systems came about.
With GitHub, you can view any changes you’ve made or even revert to previous versions of a project. Though that is hands-down the best feature of the tool, it does boast others, such as a rich open-source development community and components such as bug tracking, task management and feature requests.
Sublime Text
Though run by a one-man development team, Sublime Text is one of the best code editors on the market today. Sublime Text features an extremely efficient, super speedy, and visually appealing interface. It features a myriad of keyboard shortcuts that allow you to navigate to a page’s symbols, files, and lines with a few clicks of the keyboard and that make it possible to make simultaneous edits to various aspects of a website. Though these keyboard shortcuts only save you a few seconds for each edit you make, those precious seconds add up over an eight-hour day of coding.
Iconic 2
Iconic 2 is noteworthy because it is designed to be used for cross-platform mobile apps development AND for frontend web development. This comprehensive and do-it-all software tool makes it easy for you to build impressive web applications in a single codebase and for any type of platform, whether it be desktop, tablet or smartphone. Of course, those aren’t the only benefits of this tool.
Iconic 2 is 100% free (crazy, right?), possesses a vast number of built-in push notifications and plugins and is supported by content management tools such as Stack Overflow and Slack. Companies that use Iconic 2 often experience rapid growth and develop from unknown startups into leading organizations in impressively little time.
When it comes to frontend development, you will need a lot of sophisticated tools in your arsenal. Chrome DevTools, GitHub, Sublime Text, and Iconic 2 may not be able to do it all, but with each of them at your disposal, you can do it all.
