Web design being the wide field it is, has had numerous applications developed to cater for its wide demand. Most of the applications offer the most important requirements needed to design a standard website. The tools are easily accessible especially online and nowadays, you do not need to be a web design guru to come up with a website that can sell. You only need to utilize the various available tools and the numerous online tutorials and you are good to go. However, just like in any other professions, there are the most popular and essential tools that you cannot do without whether you are a guru or a newbie. This article focuses on the five most vital tools essential for web design.

Adobe Fireworks is one of the most important web design tools. It is a commercial hybrid of vector graphics editor and rater developed by Adobe. It is usually available with Windows and Mac operating systems. It is designed precisely for web designers and offers a wide range of tools and options that make it relatively easy for you to design your site. Some of the featurex it possesses are; ability to package a site as PDF with components that can be clicked on and slices that can dice and slice a design mockup into CSS or HTML.

Another important tool for web design is the infamous Photoshop, a popular commercial Mac and Windows operating system compatible commercial graphics editor. It is designed for professional designers and photographers and it is perfect for graphics creation and manipulation of images. It contains all the necessary tools and options for addition of effects to your images, automation and workflow enhancements such as filters, brushes, scripting, layer comps and revert option.

Panic Coda is a distinctive shareware application for web development available for Mac operating system. Its main purpose is to minimize the use of many applications in developing websites and in turn enhance your design team’s workflow. It uses a tabbed interface for SVN, text editing, CSS, file transfers and books which are searchable.

Dream weaver is another must have tool in web designing. It is also a commercial application available for Windows and Mac with featured packed suite of tools that have the options of a built-in FTP client, syntax highlighting, Code Hinting, workflow options, project management and Live View which allows you to preview your source code. It easily integrates with other adobe applications allowing sharing of smart objects for simple and fast editing of graphic components.

Last but definitely not the least is the Firebug, a source-in browser that is both free and open. T is a web development tool designed for the Firefox web browser. It has a myriad of features that include a logging Console, a debugging and analyzing JavaScript, on-the-fly CSS and HTML editing for debugging and an instinctive Document Object Model that serves as to inspect the various elements of a website and see how they are relating together.

Other tools that are also of paramount importance in a website include Adobe Flash, Aptana, Web Developer among others.