Throughout the design and development process, our team likes to utilize a series of plugins. These plugins add new functionality to a website project. In this blog post we are sharing a few of our favorites along with our web designers and developments professional takeaways.

Google’s Lighthouse

For those who are not familiar, Lighthouse is used for improving the overall quality of a web page. This automated tool can be run against public or private pages. It then gives insight into the pages performance, SEO and more. All you have to do is provide Lighthouse with the URL to audit. 

YM’s Take– “Google’s Lighthouse is a great way to get a snapshot and a score of how your website is performing. As  web developers, we like to use it to see if there’s anything we to adjust like image sizing or accessibility elements.”

Github Copilot 

Github Copilot is an awesome plugin for efficient coding. This AI pair programmer is powered by OpenAI Codenx and suggests individual lines of code. The best way to use this plugin is to divide your code into smaller functions and to add comments as you code. 

YM’s Take– “Github Copilot is a powerful auto complete that is shockingly useful and accurate. We like it because it allows us to code faster, it takes away the “boring” coding.”

XAMPP

XAMPP stands for cross-platform, Apache, MySQL, PHP and Perl. XAMPP is a free and easy to install tool that allows web  developers to build WordPress sites offline. This solution offers more flexibility with web projects and works on Windows, Linux, and Mac. 

YM’s Take– “XAMPP is a tool to run a local web server on your own computer. We like this tool because it allows us to work offline with code that will only run on a server.”

Adobe Color

Color offers a creative community for designers and artists to share color palettes and other methods of inspiration. You can easily share what you find to other Adobe apps like Photoshop, Illustrator, and Sketch.  

YM’s Take– “As web designers, this feature is our go to when we’re looking for color inspiration. It’s a great source to use and we’re a big fans of the color wheel feature if offers.”

Eye Dropper

Eye Dropper allows you to find a specific color directly from the source. You can easily click on a color and identify what it is and save it to your clipboard for future reference. 

YM’s Take– “Eye Dropper is an awesome tool for identifying a certain color. We like to use it when I’m working on a project and trying to match a brand’s specifications.”