Kayla Knight

web design and front-end development

Website Design

Design is more than just making your website look good. It’s about strategy, the user experience, trends, best practices, and about creating a design and layout that works exactly for your brand, and your audience. Everything from planning and strategy to the final Photoshop file (PSD) for your website’s design is included.

Front-end Development

I create semantic, organized, and SEO-friendly code that is also up to standards, ensuring your website works in a wide range of browsers, is fast, and utilizes best practices. I can bundle web design and development services for you, or I can turn a PSD you already have into HTML/CSS/JavaScript.

WordPress Themes

I also create WordPress themes, bundled with my design services or given a design file I can convert it into a fully-functional WordPress website. I have experience ranging from the simplest blog websites, to large-scale and content-heavy websites. I can also do theme customizations if you already have a pre-made theme in mind.

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Getting Started with Web Development: The Top Tools, Websites, Apps, and Resources

Continuing on with the mini-series “Getting Started with Web Development”, in today’s post I’m going to talk about some of the most popular and useful tools for web development. Of course, each type of web developer may need a separate set of resources, and each web developer within each niche will have different preferences as well. There’s no right or wrong when it comes to all of the various resources out there, and this post is meant to act as a starting point and introduction to some of the most common available.

Useful Websites and Blogs

In a field that requires constant learning, any web developer’s most useful tool(s) will be the blogs and website resources that are constantly updating and teaching web developers about new topics. Furthermore, these sites have great communities surrounding them for help and support.

Below are some of my favorites. Many of these are specific to web development, while others cross over their categories to design and business within this industry as well. Nonetheless, a basis of a variety of topics is a great thing to have.

Nettuts+

Nettuts

Coding @ Smashing Magazine

Smashing Magazine

A List Apart

A List Apart

Sitepoint

Sitepoint

Cats Who Code

Cats Who Code

Integrated Development Environments (IDE’s)

IDE’s are an important tool for any serious web developer to get comfortable with. A front-end developer may use only a simple IDE such as Textmate or Notepad++ (advanced text editors), or rather the more advanced Dreamweaver. Other developers that work with a lot of server-side scripting should most definitely get comfortable with and use a more advanced editor meant for programming, specifically in web development languages. I personally use Netbeans for all of my advanced PHP work, and Notepad++ for all of my other development work (WordPress, front-end).

Netbeans

Netbeans

Eclipse

Eclipse

Aptana

Aptana

Texmate

Textmate

Notepad++

Notepad++

PHP Anywhere

PHP Anywhere

Miscellaneous Tools & Resources

Finally, here are a list of other miscellaneous tools I use every now and then. Of course, any web developer will have their own list of useful tools, apps, and resources, and these sort of bookmarks come with time. These are simply a few of my favorites.

W3C’s Markup Validator

W3C Validation

Adobe’s Browserlab

Browser Lab

CodeButton Tools

Code Button

Mod Rewrite Generator (URL Rewriter)

Mod Rewrite Generator

Regex Generator

Regex Generator

Wufoo Forms

Wufoo

SpringLoops

Spring Loops

WordPress Theme Snippets & Reference

Wordpress Snippets

Front-end Web Development Cheat Sheets

Frontend Cheat Sheets

Back-end Web Development Cheat Sheets

Backend Cheat Sheets