Front-end development is a practice that enables enterprises to create an engaging and business-centric user experience for websites. In this article, we have listed the top tools with key features that will accelerate your web development.

Creative Tim

Creative Tim provides UI tools that are based on modern frameworks and libraries, including Bootstrap, Angular, React and Vue.js. It helps you to create mobile and web applications faster.

Features of Creative Tim:

  • It provides admin dashboard template that can be used to create Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Content Management System (CMS), admin panel, project management systems and more.
  • It provides you with a Bootstrap admin panel that will help you to create engaging and attractive templates or websites.
  • With a well-designed, clean and organized admin dashboard, you can manage and visualize your business data.
  • It provides you with a UI kit, comprised of fully coded components to ease the development process.

2. Novi

Novi is a drag-and-drop website builder that enables developers to easily design websites in less time. All you need to do is drag pre-set elements and place them wherever you want them on your web page. It will be suitable for:

  • Developers who are creating websites for their clients.
  • Non-technical people who are planning to launch their website.

Features:

  • It provides you free pre-made HTML templates that you can use for your website.
  • It also provides you live demos, which can you create websites for your clients.
  • With its free HTML plug-ins, you can make your website more interactive by integrating social media, mailChimp, Google maps, etc.
  • With built-in scripts and presets, developers can complete their work faster.
  • It provides you an advanced code editor to add your custom code and functionalities.

3. One

One is a web-development kit that you can use for everything from project enhancement (like converting HTML templates to WordPress, creating privacy policy pages and banners, etc.) to project promotion (including logo writing, web copywriting and on-site optimization). It provides you thousands of templates and themes, a wide variety of graphical elements, plugins and additional services.

Features:

  • It provides useful services such as implementing logos, activating built-in contact forms, installing templates and more.
  • It provides 24/7 customer support service.
  • It will help you to configure your template with a payment interface, taxes, currencies, shipping, order, contact details and more.
  • With its various services and tools, you can launch e-commerce websites, fully-fledged blogs and create landing pages for your website.

4. Npm

Npm is a free and open-source software library for Node.js. This means, first you need to install Node.js in order to install npm on your computer. It contains a wide range of reusable code that JavaScript developers can use to build powerful applications. According to the npm website, “npm is used by over 11,000,000 JavaScript developers around the world”.  

Features:

  • To access more tools and packages, you need to create an org account. Follow this link to create your account: https://www.npmjs.com/signup?next=/org/create. It doesn’t require you to set up any configuration, as everything is readily available to you.
  • It contains a free collection of packages of open-source code for Node.js, mobile apps, front-end web apps and more.
  • It enables you to control who can access the modules within your team, empowering team management capabilities.

5. TypeScript

TypeScript is an open-source front-end programming language used to develop web or JavaScript-based applications. It compiles to simple and plain JavaScript code that can run on any web browser or in any JavaScript engine (supporting ECMAScript 3 or the latest version). It is a typed superset of JavaScript that starts with the same semantics and syntax as JavaScript.

Features:

  • Being a superset of JavaScript, TypeScript uses existing Javascript code and supports other JavaScript libraries, enabling developers to write a clean and faster code.
  • Static typing is one of the best features of TypeScript that allows developers to catch errors more effectively while debugging the code, simplifying the testing and debugging process.
  • It enables developers to use highly-productive development tools to build powerful and intuitive web applications.
  • It is developed on GitHub and can be used in any JavaScript host. You can get its source code from here: https://github.com/Microsoft/TypeScript

6. Angular

Angular is a powerful tool that facilitates front-end development. It is an open-source web application framework, developed by Google. It simplifies the development and testing process, empowering developers with various features to build apps for any deployment target. It contains a wide variety of declarative templates, enabling developers to build robust and excellent apps with just a few lines of code.

It’s features include:

  • It enables you to use modern web platform capabilities to build high-performance apps with zero-step installation process.
  • It contains various template syntax that can be used to create User Interfaces (UI).
  • With Angular Command Line Interface (CLI) feature, you can build, test and deploy your application quickly.
  • Through Angular Application User Interface, you can create high-performance animations, without writing a lot of code.
  • With enhanced Integrated Development Environment (IDE), it can provide extensive facilities to developers for software development, such as instant error detection, intelligent source code editor and more.

7. Grunt

Grunt is a popular JavaScript task runner. It eradicates the pattern of your repetitive tasks and automates the front-end development work, including unit testing, compilation, etc. It can be useful when you are required to deliver the project in less time, reducing your time-to-market. Your team can build web-based apps with minimal effort. It also offers hundreds of plug-ins that can help you with front-end development.  

Features:

  • With the huge ecosystem of Grunt, you can automate almost everything related to front-end development tasks.
  • It provides certain tools that help in reducing the chances of errors.
  • It includes numerous built-in tasks and plug-ins, helping to speed up the development process and increasing the performance of your project.

Here, you can see the weekly downloads status for Grunt:

8. Google Chrome DevTools

Chrome DevTools are built into Google Chrome, and it contains a set of web developing tools that can be used to create high-quality apps.

Features of Google Chrome DevTools:

Following are DevTools UI that help developers to improve productivity and build high-performance apps.

  • Device mode:  It is used to simulate mobile devices, including test mobile responsiveness, emulating sensors and more.
  • Elements Panel: With it, you can view and change CSS (Cascading Style Sheet) and DOM, tweak and inspect your web pages, inspect and modify animations, find unused JavaScript and CSS code, speeding up the page load and saving your mobile users cellular data.
  • Console panel: It is used to view and run JavaScript code.
  • Sources panel: It is used to run and debug JavaScript code.
  • Network Panel: It is used to find network issues, view and debug network activity.
  • Performance panel: It is used to increase page load and improve runtime performance of apps.
  • Memory panel: It is used to fix memory-related issues.
  • Application panel: It manages databases, storage, and caches. Also, it analyzes and deletes cookies (messages that web servers passed to your web browser) from the website.
  • Security panel: It analyzes security issues.

9. GuideGuide

GuideGuide lets you create pixel-perfect grids quickly. It enables you to create and manipulate guides in various design tools, including Photoshop, Sketch, Adobe Illustrator and Adobe XD.  

Features of GuideGuide:

  • It lets you create custom grids.
  • Based on canvas or artboard, you can create or clear guides.
  • You can mark edges or midpoints within the guides.
  • With its efficient tools, you can create a clean and attractive layout for your web applications.

10. GitHub

GitHub is a software development and collaboration platform for software developers. It is a subsidiary of Micrososft that allows developers to store and review source code for the project. It enables developers to modify, adapt and enhance or improve software functionalities from its free of cost public repositories. However, its private repositories are chargeable.

Features:

  • It enables developers to review the source code and can track the changes made to the
  • code by other developers.
  • It provides developers with the following tools and features tools to manage the project effectively:
  1. GitHub Gist: It enables users to share code or other notes.
  2. GitHub Flow: It is branch-based workflow for regularly updated deployments.
  3. GitHub Pages: It is a static webpages used for project hosting, extracting information directly from organization’s or individual’s GitHub repository.
  4. GitHub desktop: With this feature, you can access GitHub from Mac desktops or Windows, instead of going to GitHub’s website.