HTML Editors

Any designer should back their skills with a little bit of coding knowledge. Out of any coding languages, designers should know HTML, PHP and CSS (as well as their updates, i.e: HTML 5 and CSS3 are still in development, but will be the new standard soon). They are the most important as they broaden your skills and allow you to code your designs for the Internet.
In this post, we'll see what HTML editor you should use.

Dreamweaver from the fabulous Creative Suite by Adobe has a pretty clean and organized interface. It also supports multiple coding languages. I personally started coding with dreamweaver as it made my first steps towards coding easier with "auto-complete" of coding syntax.
A free trial is available on the Adobe website, but if you ever decide to buy it, you'll need to break the bank for a solid $399.

After my free trial of Dreamweaver expired, I started looking for other HTML editor, but this time, free ones. It's not easy finding a free HTML editor that doesn't look like it was built in the 1990's, and after trying 2 or 3 of them out and uninstalling them from my computer, I stumbled upon Coffee Cup HTML Editor which has a free version. The only difference with the paid version is a orange bar at the top of the window that nags you to buy the software ($49). Personally, the orange bar doesn't bother me at all, there are no other restrictions, and the quality of the software is definitely worth it.

Here's a screenie with the orange bar that appears in the free version:

Coffee Cup Free HTML Editor is worth a try. If you know of any other free decent HTML editors, please post in the comments.

Now go learn your coding skills over at W3 Schools.

Blogs and Websites - Valuable Resources

The Internet is crowded with web pages and blogs. Some of them good, some bad. And finding the good ones isn't always the easiest task. So here is a collection of the most valuable sites I have found for design resources such as textures, icon packs, fonts, vectors and brushes. Some of these also have great tutorials and articles on how to be a more successful designer.


Textures, vectors, brushes, tutorials and other freebies:

http://www.designm.ag
DesignM.ag is a great for all things design including freebies and articles.

http://www.bittbox.com
BittBox is a collection of free vectors, fonts, brushes and textures. It is an excellent collection of freebies for any designer's library.

http://www.webdesignerdepot.com
Web Designer Depot is a great place to find inspiration for projects with resources, examples, tutorials, tips & tricks and guidelines on how to be an effective and successful designer.

http://www.desizntech.info
Desizntech is yet another place to find cool icon packs, textures, illustrations. Don't be fooled by the .info extension, and check out this post, the quality speaks for itself.

http://www.abduzeedo.com
Abduzeedo is my favorite blog to look for inspiration pieces before I start on a project. Their daily posts "Daily Inspiration" are full of user submitted pictures and videos. Abduzeedo has great community input and is a very popular design blog.

http://www.colorburned.com
Color Burned is yet another place to find good resources to work with Photoshop.

http://www.webdesignledger.com
Web Design Ledger is great place to find tutorials and inspirational pieces.

http://www.grungetextures.com
Grunge Textures is a great places to find textures. They have a collection of over 1,300 high-resolution images.

http://www.ilovetypography.com
I Love Typography is a blog featuring fonts, different typefaces, styles and all things related to typography.

http://www.dafont.com
DaFont is a website with a very large collection of fonts to chose from. They feature trial fonts, and free fonts that are classified in categories.



Other resources:

Having a full-blown designer toolbox for Photoshop with all your textures, brushes and other files is a huge step in become a more productive designer. But what about the non-crafty part of web design? Here are a list of blogs that identify trends, discuss branding/marketing techniques, and give some helpful insight on approaching web design as a career.

http://www.smashingmagazine.com
Smashing Magazine is one of the corner stones of design on the web and if you haven't been there yet, I highly suggest you give them a visit. They are very informative about the latest trends and techniques in Web development and are definitely in my RSS reader (check out their freebies page).

http://www.alistapart.com
A List Apart is another one of my favorite blogs. They post 2 new articles every 2 weeks and are written by professionals in the field.

http://www.makeuseof.com
Make Use Of is a blog with technology related articles featuring new software/hardware and other techie things.

There are many more blogs and useful resources out there but these are some of the places that earned a bookmark. Feel free to post additional resources you feel should show in this list in the comments below.