Top 10 Web Development Tools and Tips to Become a Successful Web Developer

What Is a Web Development Tool? 

Web development tools — also called dev tools — are apps and software that web developers use to test and debug the code and interface of web applications and websites they create. These tools help simplify and streamline the web development process for developers without compromising performance. They help the developers work with various technologies to create responsive web designs. Responsive web pages can improve the online browsing experience and SEO, lower bounce rates, and reduce maintenance efforts. 

In other words, the top web development tools are built to help developers design and develop websites easily, quickly, and cost-effectively.

A Look into the Top Web Development Tools for 2022

The one-size-fits-all approach doesn't always guarantee the best results when selecting the right development tools. It's best to make your choice after considering the budget, client's goals, and the desired outcomes. The chosen tools should offer you a significant ROI, ease of use, scalability, and customization. 

Here are the ten most popular tools that web developers worldwide use for their projects. These are some tools you need to be familiar with and will, perhaps, use more frequently in your career as a web developer.

1. Sublime Text

Sublime Text is an excellent open-source editor for code, pros, and markup. Packed with advanced features and enhancements, Sublime Text is very popular with web designers due to its slick user interface and extensions for highlighting syntax, source file finding, and code metrics analysis. It provides an array of keyboard shortcuts for simultaneous editing quick navigation to files, symbols, lines. It supports many programming languages and markup languages.   

2. Chrome Developer Tools

What if you could debug your program in JavaScript or edit your CSS and HTML code in real-time while running performance analysis of your web page? Google's Chrome Developer Tools let you do just that and a lot more. Available in Chrome and Safari, these tools are considered one of the top web development tools for developers to access the internals of web applications. In addition, there's a variety of in-built tools that developers can use to view and update webpage styles and change Document Object Model (DOM). 

3. jQuery

jQuery is a feature-rich JavaScript library that helps web developers to include additional functionalities to websites. As an essential front-end language, jQuery is used to navigate and manipulate the HTML DOM tree. It is arguably the best JavaScript library and an excellent tool for creating animations, adding plugins, or traversing documents.  

4. Sass

There are many SaaS development tools, libraries, and frameworks to build SaaS (software as a service) applications. It is a mature, robust, and stable pre-processing scripting language that compiles CSS codes. Saas can help increase and utilize the functionality of a website's existing CSS like inheritance, functions, variables, nesting, etc. With Saas, it gets easy to write codes that can be easily maintained, thus reducing the need for CSS in coding. 

5. CodePen

CodePen is a user-friendly front-end web development tool with various functionalities used for front-end web designing in organizations of all sizes. It provides all necessary features of the Integrated Development Environment (IDE) in a web browser. Showcase your HTML, CSS, and JavaScript snippets with CodePen. 

6. Angular JS

Developed by Google, Angular JS is an open-source web framework that allows developers to extend the HTML syntax of their applications. The result is a more expressive, readable, and easy-to-develop environment that would be impossible to build with HTML alone. This makes Angular JS an invaluable skill to have in any front-end developer's toolbox and one of the top web development tools for 2022. 

7. GitHub

One of the most powerful web development tools for professionals today, GitHub is a platform for developers to share and collaborate. Initially, it was only version control software, but today GitHub allows users to share and store code, contribute to others' projects, and track revisions. With GitHub, you can manage several projects by creating several review processes for your written code. Plus, it can be deployed as a cloud-hosted or self-hosted solution. 

8. Grunt

A JavaScript task automation tool built on NodeJS, Grunt helps automate most iterative web development tasks. Developers widely adopt it to carry on redundant processes like compilation, minification, unit testing, linting, and similar jobs. Grunt is free and easy to install. It includes an exhaustive repository of plugins and allows developers to build their own plugins. Further, Grant supports other front-end web development tools like Sass to complete pre-configured tasks.  

9. WordPress

The world's most popular CMS and online blogging platform, WordPress, is developed with PHP. WordPress boasts of free and paid members and is an exceptional platform for hosting websites. The software can be used as CMS to design a commercial webpage. Salient features of WordPress include WYS/WYG text editor, co-authoring with many authors, permalinks, Trackback/Pingback, static page, etc. 

10. Apache

This free, open-source web server software runs on 67% of web servers worldwide. Fast, reliable, and secure, Apache establishes the connection between the server-side and client-side of a website and delivers files between them. The software accepts directory (HTTP) requests from web users and sends them their required information through files and web pages. Users can put files into the root directory of their Apache software to enable file-sharing with other users.     

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How to Carve Out a Successful Career as a Web Developer?

Web development is a booming job market, with the employment rate of web developers likely to witness 13% growth by 2030. With websites being necessary for every business today, a web developer is currently one of the most sought-after jobs. As a professional who designs, develops and manages websites, a web developer is responsible for several duties throughout the software development lifecycle, from concept and design to testing.

Are you an aspiring web developer or a developer struggling to become successful? Are you wondering how to break into this role? Equipping yourself with the relevant skills is your first step into a successful and rewarding web development career. 

To become a successful web developer, you should develop a fundamental understanding of top web development tools, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Building these basic web developer skills will help you gain the foundation and logic required to work with programming languages. The knowledge of CSS and CSS frameworks will also guarantee you jobs and opportunities for years to come. As you keep growing your skills, you'll need an area of specialization like front-end developer, back-end developer, or full-stack developer.  

As the demand for web developers keeps skyrocketing, the need to learn and update your resume with emerging web development skills is higher than ever. Enroll yourself in a full-stack web development certification training from Simplilearn and jumpstart your career in web development. Get industry certification after completing your course to enhance your credentials and gain an edge with top recruiters in the field. Register today to get started!