As this year draws to a close, we’ve compiled a list of our favourite tools, websites, tips and tricks that we’ve used over the past 12 months.
A typical zeitgeist would include things from 2011 only, where as our list may contain things that have been around before, but have had a particular impact on our work and business throughout the year along with some fun ones we’ve been playing around with.
You can click on the titles, and images to go to the corresponding site for each items. In no particular order, here we go:
WordPress
We’re in the business of designing and developing websites built on WordPress and so it was a natural choice to include the mighty WP in our list. Now on version 3.3 it’s grown from strength to strength and continues to help us make great sites for our clients.
If you don’t know already, there’s a huge, thriving community that surrounds WordPress with a multitude of theme and plugin developers who are pushing out some amazing plugins:
Posts 2 Posts
This plugin allows you to create many-to-many relationships between posts of any type: post, page, custom posts types and is incredibly powerful for linking content on both the front and back end of WordPress.
WordPress SEO by Yoast
WordPress is already technically pretty good for SEO in its “out of the box” state. Yoast’s plugin builds upon this, allowing you to write better content, improve the already existing SEO and optimise your WordPress site and its content.
Regenerate Thumbnails
If you’ve changed the sizes of images in your Media settings then you want to update the thumbnails that already exist on your site, right? The Regenerate Thumbnails plugin does this with ease! You can either regenerate the thumbnails for all image uploads, individual image uploads, or specific multiple image uploads.
Gravity Forms
Forms, the bane of many a designer/developer? We were tasked with creating some complex forms for the front side of a site in a recent project for a client. Having been recommended Gravity Forms, there was no looking back as it makes the task of form-building so easy. It’s a commercial plugin but seriously justifies its price tag.
GitHub
GitHub has been a major player in enhancing our teamwork this year and it’s online project hosting has enabled us to work smoother, quicker and deploy sites with ease – in short, it’s been a godsend.
960.gs
We’ve been using Nathan Smith’s 960 framework for quite a while now and although some may argue that as screen resolutions increase in size it’s time to move up to a larger framework, we still endeavour to use this in the majority of our projects. Simple, easy to dive in and get to grips with and still powerful enough to make great looking websites.
Strip This comic maker
StripThis! is a Javascript/HTML/CSS3 engine that can create a simple comic from a set of structured sentences that, starting from a database of words, are natural as much as possible.
That means that you don’t need to code and draw anything particular for putting together a comic strip with StripThis!, except - obviously - if you’re going to extend the word database.
The comic is composed on-the-fly using HTML elements, CSS transformations, custom fonts combined together starting from the specified script and that’s why your webcomic is actually made with web. Since the comic is not rasterized, a lot of funny things can be done, like instant translations of your comic in different languages, thanks to Google Translate APIs (read “funny translated”) and tooltips on balloons and characters.
Subtle Patterns
Subtle Patterns is a site and tool that does exactly what it says on the tin. Providing high quality, subtle patterns for use in your web projects, it’s an ever-expanding archive of some very tasteful and useful patterns which can be downloaded as image files or for the Photoshop people, as a pattern file, ready to add to your arsenal of tools.
If you’re a GIMP user, you can grab the .pat files from GitHub here.
LESS
LESS extends CSS with dynamic behaviour such as variables, mixins, operations and functions. You can run LESS client-side and also on the server side. We’ve been using LESS to speed up our front end work and it’s proving to be a valuable tool so far.
Sublime Text Editor
Sublime Text is a sophisticated text editor for code, html and prose. It has a slick user interface too.
Normalize CSS
Normalize.css is a customisable CSS file that makes browsers render all elements more consistently and in line with modern standards. The creators researched the differences between default browser styles in order to precisely target only the styles that need normalizing. There’s a demo here.
HTML5 Shim
HTML5 Shim is Javascript for Internet Explorer to recognise and allow the styling of HTML5 elements.
Wunderlist
Wunderlist is a beautiful looking, simple to use task management app that works across iOS, Android, OS X, Windows and web app. It’s incredibly easy to set up new daily tasks that sync across your devices and tools to collaborate with other people. Winner!
Hype Machine
We’ve been fans of the Hype Machine since it started and this year was no different. Continuing to index some of the best, hottest tracks from the blogosphere, they expanded their offering to include great apps for iOS and Android and back in June we were the featured blog on their radio show, where we spoke about our Drum and Bass coverage, electronic music and how Friedmylittlebrain came to life.
Ultimate CSS Gradient Generator
Using a CSS gradient builder that has a very similar UI/interface to the one in Photoshop means you can focus on getting the right gradient for your design. We recently used this with our fancy tags for WordPress too.
What do you think to our list and what were you favourite tools, sites and web apps this year – pop a comment in the box below!