My six favourite online tools as a web designer & SEO

As a web designer I spend a lot of time online. A LOT of time! Over the years I’ve found loads of different, interesting and useful tools and websites that help me to complete tasks that would otherwise be burdensome, time-consuming or just plain annoying. Hopefully by sharing some of these tools, I can help other business owners, web designers or just people interested in performing tasks more effectively to lighten the load a little throughout their day. So without further delay, here’s my list of six favourite online tools.

1. Snag.gy

This is a simple screen grab tool that enables you to take a screenshot of your window (usually a browser, but can also be an application or file explorer, etc) and upload it to their website to edit, share and store a screengrab.

The reason I like this tool is that it enables you to crop your images quickly, edit them (add text or draw on them if needed) and share your screen grab as a link. The other benefit of using a tool like Snag.gy for your screen grabs is that if you’re sharing a screen grab (say via email) all you need to do is send a link and this reduces the size of attached images making your emails quicker to send, particularly if you’re sending a few screenshots through.

https://snag.gy/

2. Dirty Markup

By far one of the most useful tools I’ve ever come across. Most websites I build will have anywhere between 500-1500 lines of custom CSS. Dirty Markup is an easy way to clean up my sometimes messy coding and make it all neat and tidy. This online service will also clean up your HTML, CSS and Javascript.

https://www.10bestdesign.com/dirtymarkup/

3. Unclosed Tag Finder

This is a very handy tool if you’re working in a HTML environment (code) and something isn’t working or you can’t quite figure out why that table, div or element isn’t working properly. Because code is made up of opening and closing tags, and a webpage can be made up of hundreds and hundreds of lines of code, it’s possible you’ve missed a closing tag or an element of the tag (like a > or /). This online tool will help you track down those pesky unclosed tags that may be causing an issue with your page.

https://www.aliciaramirez.com/closing-tags-checker/

4. DiffChecker

DiffChecker is an excellent tool that enables you to check two separate pieces of text, code or content and see where the differences are. This great little tool isn’t just for code. You can put in a series of changes in a document so you can compare against your original to see where the differences are.
Likewise you can add new code and previous code to see where changes or differences are.

https://www.diffchecker.com/

5. Portent’s Content Idea Generator

Sometimes we all need a little help to generate ideas and this is just the tool if you’re trying to think about things to write for your blog, Facebook posts or articles for your website. Simply add a topic to the text box on this site and it will come up with headline for an article for you. Don’t like the idea? Simply click the refresh button next to the text box and it will generate another idea for you!

https://www.portent.com/tools/title-maker

6. Remove Duplicate Lines Tool

Got a list of emails or numbers that you want duplicates removed from? Plug the list into this handy webpage and it will remove any duplicates you might have in your content or list. This is a great tool if you work with mailing lists or spreadsheets where you want to remove duplicate listings.

http://textmechanic.com/text-tools/basic-text-tools/remove-duplicate-lines/

So there’s my list of six favourite tools that I use pretty much on a daily basis. Hopefully you find them as useful and helpful as I do.