Web development at its very basic is a detailed process that entails more than just designing a site. It therefore requires very many tools for it to be a success. However, due to the complexity of this process and the many details that it requires, it can be a very expensive process. For a webmaster operating on a tight budget, any chance to cut down on costs is welcome. Fortunately, there are many ways in which you can cut on the cost of development of your website. One of them is to go for any available free tools that can help you in the process. This article reviews some of the free tools you can use in web development.

The free tools can be classified into several categories. There are error checking tools and browser add-ons tools for Firefox, Internet Explorer and Opera. These tools are excellent for cross checking your developed website before launching it in order to ensure it is optimized for all browsers and error free. One of the error checking tools is the CSS validator that is developed by the developers of CSS language.  It is an open source and free web-based tool that scans your CSS for any syntactic and lexical errors and gives a report on the error it finds. The report will not only consist of details of any errors found but also warnings on things to be aware of.

The W3C HTML validator is also developed by the same organization that developed the language and it is a free open source web-based tool used to check for any syntactic or lexical errors on your HTML source. It also determines the SGML profile of the page in question based on the doctype. The W3C Link Checker is another free tool for scanning the website to find any broken links.

There are also some free tools for Firefox extensions one of which is ColorZilla. This is a tool found on the status bar that has a color picker, eyedropper and basic full-page zoom settings. It serves the purpose of color comparison on your site and the full page zoom settings can resize text and images. Firebug is another important tool that is powerful and quite easy to use. It has a console for listing errors, debugger for debugging JavaScript and inspector for navigating the elements and layout of the page as well as its DOM. Firefox also has a HTML validator that validates every page that is visited and a convenient web developer extension for helping developers in their work.

Internet Explorer also has some free add-ons that can be very useful in web development. These are for example the Developer Toolbar which is the Internet Explorer equivalent of Firefox’s Web Developer. Opera add-on tools include CSS Editor for editing the stylesheets of a page, DOM Console for DOM navigation and DOM Snapshot for displaying the webpage’s generated source. Other tools that can help you install multiple versions of Internet Explorer needed during development on a single computer include VMware Server and Evolt stand-alone builds.