I appreciate any suggestions of other great tools as I am sure they will help me.

Anyway – here we go, number 10.

10) Keyword Density Tool
There are quite a few keyword density tools out there and they really help me when looking at sites I create in the way a spider may see them. Some tools allow keywords and phrases, others give you a ‘tag cloud’ with the keywords in. Here are a few links to some I have been using:

http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/keyword-density/

Allows you to choose between 1, 2 and 3 length phrases/keywords as well as allowing you to include or exclude meta tags, title tags and alt tags.

http://www.webconfs.com/keyword-density-checker.php

A very simple keyword tool that lists the occurrence and density of each word within the site.

9) Sitemap Generator
A Sitemap, I believe is of great importance when submitting your site to search engines. Since I’ve been creating websites, I have come across a few different sites, and programs for a variety of cases.

http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/

This is a really good generator to use if the website has less than 500 pages. The only problem is when the page is bigger than that. I created a website for a client that had around 1000 pages and so this was not feasible.

http://gsitecrawler.com/

A great program for those of us running Windows. Unfortunately I use Ubuntu so for me to run this program means a Virtual Machine, which is fine by me. If anyone knows of a similar program for Ubuntu I would be very grateful.

8) FTP Client
For FTP Connections to my server, I use my File Manager Nautilus. It makes easy work for dragging and dropping images, files, fonts etc. I don’t really have anything else to say about this because the program I use for actually designing the websites has an FTP client built in.

7) VMWare
This really only matters for those using a Linux Development Environment. As we all know, Internet Explorer and other browsers parse some CSS code differently. VMWare helps here by allowing the use of both browsers without having to use Wine. This works great if you have a powerful enough machine to run it alongside your development tools.

6) Firebug
Now I’m sure that we all know what Firebug is. It’s a great tool for viewing exactly what is happening on the site you are developing. I especially like the inspection tool that allows you to highlight divs and display their markup.

5) GIMP/Photoshop
GIMP, Photoshop, in my eyes are both great graphic design tools. I use GIMP because of the operating platform I am running but after seeing the amount of tutorials available for Photoshop as apposed to GIMP (I know there are lots out there for GIMP but when searching for help I mainly came across Photoshop) I am tempted to get Photoshop for my Virtual Machine. (I will never go back to Windows).

4) Google Webmaster Tools or SEO Toolbar
Google Webmaster Tools is a great site allowing us developers to view the top search queries, submit our sitemaps, view how many pages have been indexed and see what errors Google has found.
The SEO Toolbar can be found http://tools.seobook.com/seo-toolbar/ and sits on my Firefox toolbar giving me a lot of information about each site I visit. The Pagerank, the number of inbound links, DMOZ Directory entries and lots more. It helps me keep a track of my performance when trying to promote a website.

3) Google!
Where would I be without Google? Especially with me not being on the scene for that long, Google has helped me find solutions to my problems.

2) Host Gator Hosting
I use Host Gator for hosting my sites and I have  – never – had a problem with them. The hosting is Linux based and uses cPanel. SSH Access has to be acquired by an email, but other than that I have not had to raise a support query. I do recommend them.

1) Netbeans IDE
Now I am not sure how many people will agree with me upon this. When I design websites, it is ALL done by hand. Hence why I use Netbeans. Before I started getting involved in more Website Design, I used Netbeans for a Java Development Project. The IDE was great and so I decided to carry on using it for PHP Development.
Netbeans has its own FTP Client built in so once any changes have been made to the work it’s a right-click upload. I can manage many different sites with this client, using its ability to have multiple FTP connections.

Now I know that some or even most of you may think I have missed out some important tools but these are my tools that I find I use on a day-to-day basis. Please do comment with any suggestions that can make my life easier – afterall – I am still learning!

Regards,
Jack