Developing a well-rounded aesthetically pleasing website can be a daunting task even for the most seasoned web developer. You must identify current trends and standards and determine ways to incorporate them into your designs. Luckily, there are many free tools which are available that can help you speed up your efforts and work in a more efficient manner. Below are 20 tools which are sure to benefit all developers.

Typetester is an online application for comparing how different fonts and font attributes will appear on a given set of text.

Its primary role is to make the life of a web designer easier by allowing them to quickly and easily visually compare different typefaces.

Create a php form in seconds with this free and easy to use tool. If you need a little more power you can check out its parent program

MachForm or great alternatives wufoo and formspring (both of which offer limited free versions and paid premium versions).

An international site created for color lovers. You can search the site for color palettes that you may use for projects or create new

palettes which can be rated by peers. Great for inspiration or critique of design ideas.

Firebug integrates with Firefox to put a wealth of web development tools at your fingertips while you browse. You can edit, debug, and monitor

CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page. This is probably one of the most widely used web developer tools out there. If you don't have it,

get it now!

Need to know how to display the trademark symbol on one of your pages, this tool if just for you. The HTML Entity Lookup searches the html

entities for matches to the searched character based on how the character looks. For instance, the letter "c" would match © and ¢ entity, because

of the way they look. This is really a tool that you need to try to understand how useful it is (also available as a dashboard widget for you Mac

users).

The 960 Grid System is an effort to streamline web development workflow by providing commonly used dimensions, based on a width of 960 pixels.

There are two variants: 12 and 16 columns, which can be used separately or in tandem. Watch an in depth screencast on this framework.

Em Calculator is a small JavaScript tool which allows you to enter a size in pixels and displays what the corresponding em value would be.

This tool is extremely easy to use and handy for a quick reference.

Browser Shots allows you to view your website in around 100 different browsers on 4 different platforms to determine the ultimate cross browser

support. Given how many different types of configurations exists today, it is important to ensure that your site looks its best on as many platforms

as possible.

Iconfinder provides high quality icons for web designers and developers in an easy and efficient way. You simply type in a keyword into the search

box and Iconfinder brings you back icons beautiful icons which you can freely use.

Want to know the font that your favorite blog uses, this tool can help you. Just upload an image of the font that you are intrigued about and the

tool will do its best to match it with the right font. If you would rather trust a real person, the WhatTheFont forums are a great resource as well.

A great Firefox plugin that lets you draw out a ruler to get the pixel width and height of any elements on a webpage.

With ColorZilla you can get a color reading from any point in your browser, quickly adjust this color and paste it into another program. You can zoom

the page you are viewing and measure distances between any two points on the page.

Pingdom loads a complete HTML page including all objects (images, CSS, JavaScripts, RSS, Flash and frames/iframes). It mimics the way a page is loaded

in a web browser and then displays how long each of those elements took to load using nice visual time bars. This can be very useful when you are trying

to improve the efficiency of your site.

Test Everything lets you run your website though approx. 100 different validators and testers, all from the comfort of one application. This can save

an enormous amount of time during the testing phase of your site development.

Sprites can increase the speed of your site by reducing the number of HTTP requests and are therefore becoming more popular. Using them, however,

requires a good amount of foresight and planning which can make using them somewhat difficult. This amazing online tool allows you to upload your

images in a zip file where they are then combined into a sprite. Once the sprite is created, it creates the CSS that you will need to use the sprite

and allows you to download all of if free of charge.

An extremely useful Firefox plugin which provides many tools which web developers use on a daily basis. Great for quickly validating your XHTML or

inspecting HTTP header information.

There are plenty of tools available that tell you whether a domain is taken or not. What sets Domainr apart is that it takes your query and then

tries to create a more memorable name. Domainr helps you explore the entire domain name space beyond the ubiquitous and crowded .com, .net and .org.

Inspired by jish.nu, burri.to and del.icio.us this tool can come in handy when you just can't think of a unique domain name.

Font Burner is a free online tool that allows you to search through over 1000 fonts they have available. Once you have found a font you like, the

tool provides you with a snippet of code which allows you to use the font on your site, free of charge. The font will then be displayed on every

computer, regardless if the user has the font installed or not.

Smush.It is a neat application which uses non-lossy image optimization tools to squeeze the last bytes out of your images

Are you about to release a product or come out of beta and are wondering whether your site will be able to take the increased traffic? Load Impact

is a free tool which tests your site at different load levels and then displays your results in an easy to understand graph.

The End!

Well hopefully you will find something useful in this list. It is by no means an exhaustive list, but simply a list of tools that I have found to

be useful in the past and that you may as well.

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