Just like in most other professions, a web designer’s set of tools is what brings a concept into fruition. There are many applications available to our disposal, but there are some that just stand out from the crowd. The tools in this article are what’s regarded as the most popular tools used for web design.

1. Firefox Developer

It’s many features include: analyzing and debugging, building and designing with CSS Grid, HTML inspector, style editor among many other tools to provide the greatest assistance with your web development needs. Firefox Developer Edition is a version of Firefox specifically for web developers. As a developer, you have access to all their DevTools.

2. Photoshop

Created for professional photographers and designers, it is the ideal application for manipulating images and creating web graphics. Adobe Photoshop is a very popular commercial graphics editor available for the Mac and Windows operating system.

3. Panic Coda

Coda’s one-window web development philosophy uses a tabbed interface for text editing, file transfers, SVN, CSS, and even “Books” which embeds web books that are searchable. Panic Coda is a shareware web development application for the Mac OS X operating system. It seeks to reduce the amount of applications (such as an FTP client, CSS editor, a version control system, etc.) you need to develop websites and to improve your team’s workflow.

4. Dreamweaver

Dreamweaver tightly integrates with other popular Adobe products such as Photoshop, allowing you to share Smart Objects for quick and easy updating and editing of graphics components.

Adobe Dreamweaver is a commercial application for web development that’s available for the Mac and Windows operating systems. Its featured-packed suite of tools and options include: syntax highlighting and very smart Code Hinting, a built-in FTP client, project management and workflow options that make team work effortless, and Live View – which shows you a preview of your source code.

5. Fireworks

Among its notable features are: “slices” for slicing and dicing a design mockup into HTML/CSS for rapidly creating prototypes, the ability to package an entire site design as a PDF with clickable components for interactive and impressive site prototypes, and optimization tools for making your web graphics as lightweight as possible.

Adobe Fireworks is a commercial raster and vector graphics editor hybrid from Adobe that’s available for the Mac and Windows operating systems. Designed specifically for web designers (unlike Photoshop), Fireworks brings you a plethora of tools and options that make full web layout prototyping a breeze.