There are a few tools that I use on an everyday basis when developing blogs or websites – and the free Web Developer Toolbar for Firefox is one of my essentials. Even if you’re not a developer or programmer you can use and do a lot of cool things with this add-on.
While there are over 100 different things that the toolbar allows you to do, there are a few features that I use every day. This toolbar has literally cut my work in half and given me the ability to do things that (before the toolbar) would take me a lot of time and energy trying to accomplish. What is really neat, is that you can use this on ANY website or blog – not just your own.
Some of my favorite features of the Web Developer Toolbar
- Display Ruler – This feature allows you to measure practically anything on a website by creating a box that you can reposition over different elements. Whether you need to see how wide a column should be, view the size of various elements on your page, or anything on a site that you would want to determine the size of, can be measured with this feature.
- View Style Information – I’m not a formal programmer or developer and everything I know is self-taught. When selected, the “view style information” gives you the ability to hover over any element on a page and it will display the CSS information in a box above your browser. This allows you to easily see how something is styled and to view the CSS of a particular item without the need to view the source code – this is probably my most-used feature.
- Edit HTML – This is yet another really cool feature of the toolbar that allows you to edit HTML without copying and pasting or going in the backend. When selected, a box of source code will appear in your browser and you can edit the HTML and see the results in real-time.
- Validation - Built into the toolbar are several options that allow you to check the validation of elements of a site including: CSS, HTML, feeds, links, and more.
View almost any aspect of a site or blog
With the Web Developer Toolbar you can view just about any type of information that relates to the structure of any site or blog. It is by far one of my favorite tools, it’s completely free, and I guarantee it can help you become more efficient and make your life easier when building your blog or website.
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