Most cost-effective tools for web development

Web development becomes more important with each passing year. What was once a luxury is now an absolute necessity for any business. This was especially done when the world had to completely shift gears because of the pandemic. More and more companies had to offer e-commerce solutions and provide potential users with all the information they needed via the web.

For some businesses, investing a large portion of their budget into a website is a no-brainer. For others, however, it is a challenge. If your company is looking to save every penny possible, you'll be happy to know that there are many tools available that can empower your developers and not break the bank.

These tools range from website frameworks to image editors, HTML editors, and tools to help make the process more efficient.

Let's take a look at some of them.

WordPress

When someone mentions WordPress , you'll probably assume they're talking about WordPress.com, which is the hosted version of the platform. But there is another version, self-hosted and open source.

So instead of paying the upgrade fees for a WordPress.com website, you can download the source code and host a website on your own data center servers. Some third-party hosting providers offer easy WordPress installations (on a domain and hosting you may already have purchased) with tools like Softaculous.

If you go this route, you will have a complete WordPress installation, with all the features offered in the paid version and without having to shell out extra money for third-party hosting. You can even deploy WordPress as a container and scale it to meet any demands that arise.

GIMP

At some point, your web developers will need graphics. No website is complete without images to entice users to click through sections or purchase products. And without flashy, professional images, you're missing out.

Fortunately, you don't have to pay the high costs of tools like Photoshop. Instead, you can opt for the open source GIMP which is a powerful image editor that offers almost all the features found in Photoshop.

GIMP can be installed on Linux, macOS and Windows and costs zero dollars. If you're looking for a way to generate brilliant website graphics on the cheap, look no further than this app.

Anchovy

Anchova is a powerful editor aimed at web developers. It adapts perfectly to HTML, CSS, Java, JavaScript, Python and Ruby. Bluefish can also be used for many other (non-web) languages. But for website programming, Bluefish is an excellent, open-source, and free tool.

You can install Bluefish on Linux, macOS and Windows. And with a very easy-to-use user interface, your developers should have no trouble getting to grips with it. Outside of the usual code editor features, Bluefish also supports dialog boxes and wizards for most HTML tags, image insertion dialog, thumbnail creation and linking, and user-customizable toolbars.

Angular.js

Angular.js is one of the most popular frameworks used to create single-page web applications. Although this is not traditional web development, most companies have started adopting SPAs due to the large volume of web traffic coming from mobile devices.

Angular.js makes it easy to build SPAs with HTML and JavaScript. And while using straight HTML is great in some cases, your developers will need the power of Angular.js to declare dynamic views in web applications.

Like most of the tools on this list, Angular.js is free to use (as well as open source).

Bold

Racy stands for Syntacically Awesome Style Sheets and is a CSS preprocessor scripting language that compiles into Cascading Style Sheets. By employing Sass, your developers can add special features to CSS, such as variables, nested rules, and mixins. This expands the feature set available to CSS, making it more powerful and flexible.

Sass has become the industry standard CSS extension and is used by large companies around the world. And since Sass has been around for over 15 years, it has a very large community of developers.

What's more, Sass is free and open source.

Chrome Dev Tools

The Chrome browser includes a very useful feature for developers called Chrome Dev Tools . This makes it possible for developers to view and change things (like CSS) dynamically. Plus, Chrome DevTools makes it easy to:

• Inspect animations
• Identify potential CSS improvements
• Inspect the CSS grid
• Force print preview mode
• Log messages
• Run JavaScript directly from the console
• Observe JavaScript values ​​in real time
• Inspect network activity
• View, edit and delete cookies
• View and edit local storage
• View and change IndexDB data
• View app cache data

Chrome DevTools offers so many built-in options that it should be considered a must-have for every developer. And since Chrome is free (and cross-platform), so are 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 of your website's code in a GitHub repository and grant access to other team members so they can collaborate with you on your project.

GitHub is used by millions of developers around the world and has become the go-to for most teams. GitHub is free to use 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

It shouldn't cost much to empower your web developers to work productively. Adding any of these tools will help your teams while keeping you from going over budget. Give these apps a try and see if they're part of your team's development toolkit.

If you liked this, be sure to check out our other articles on web development.

• Most cost-effective tools for web development
• .net vs .com: Which is the best domain extension?
• Simplify your design with Nuxt and Tailwind
• A Better PHP Alternative for Web Projects?
• The Progressive Web App: How PWAs are Evolving