CSS Editors to Speed Up your Work

September 7th, 2009

I continue to share useful tools with you and today I’m going to give you the list of good CSS editors.
Of course there are HTML editors with CSS support and most CSS professionals don’t use any editors except Notepad, but I’m sure many of you would appreciate a more sophisticated development environment for CSS coding these CSS editors offer. Besides, if you are new to CSS, you can learn by analyzing the style sheets and using live-editing, thus getting to understand how the design is actually built up.
The idea of a CSS editor lies in combining the HTML-source code with editing features of CSS-stylesheets and the website layout within a comfortable interface. Many CSS editors also offer some additional tools and features for debugging and testing, validation and preview in different browsers and many more.

Well, here is my list of good CSS editors you might find handy:

* Free CSS Toolbox

Among the features this editor offers are error check, cross-browser compatibility check, W3C CSS validator and many more.

* Xyle

Modifying the CSS-code with this advanced editor for Mac users you’ll see the changes immediately in the browser window. Among key features are the ability to filter large CSS files using smart groups, automatic formatting and selector matching

* Simple CSS

If you are a CSS beginner you’ll like this free editor. True to its name it is really very simple.

*  JustStyle CSS Editor

This powerful and easy to use editor is highly interactive and platform independent. With this editor you are able to edit the whole CSS file or select the fragments of it and edit them separately.

* CSSEdit

CSSEdit offers real-time styling of style sheets for Mac users. The editor features W3C standards validator, live-preview, integration in web-browsers, project management and others.

* Rapid CSS Editor

This editor for Windows users offers integration with W3C CSS and HTML validators,  CSS checker and validator, syntax highlighting for CSS and HTML documents, CSS code compressor, save and open files directly from FTP, fully customizable interface and many other useful features.

Well, if you have anything to share about the above mentioned CSS editors or if you’d like to give us a hint about the editor that wasn’t named in the list, do not hesitate and let us know in the comments below.

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Useful Tools for Freelance Designers

August 13th, 2009

Every freelance designer knows how hard it is sometimes to get everything done when you are a freelancer. You have to manage every single thing from emails to SEO all by yourself. You have to deal with clients, promote your own portfolio website, read the latest industry news as you have to keep up with the technologies and be aware of the latest events, you have to deal with many issues connected to running a business as finances, bills etc. All these things take time, attention and effort. So, how and when do you do actual designing and development? Here is a short list of useful tools and resources that will help you cut down the time and effort spent on things that have nothing to do with actual design and development.

Finances

Invoices Made Easy Very good and easy to use tool for sending invoices and accepting online payments.

Bill My Clients Lets you send invoices both via email and regular mail.

Less Accounting Created especially for freelancers this tool will help you easily manage your invoices and accounts.

Xero This online accounting system gives you an access to all your financial figures like invoices, bank transactions etc. anytime you need them.

PayPal The best and thus the most popular online payments service out there.

Managing your contacts

Being a freelancer you need to organize your customer base, these tools will help you do the task:

Big Contacts Lets you easily organize the information about your clients.

Zoho CRM Another good tool to manage your business activity.

These online communication tools will make it fast and comfortable to solve issues with your clients:

Skype Great choice for online communication, lets you make phone calls and have video chats.

Yugma Online video conferencing tool.

Promotion

I’m sure most of you use Twitter as one of the main promotion tools. If you do you’ll like these services and applications:

Tweet Later This great service lets you to set time when you want your tweet published.

RTweeter Another tool to schedule your tweets.

Tweetdeck is of great help when you have hundreds of followers. The tool lets you filter the users into groups, thus you won’t have to look through all the tweets to find what the user you are interested in is doing.

Well, this is for sure not the full list at all. What tools are you using to simplify and speed up your non designing activities?

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Posted in General Talk | 2 Comments »