Modern CSS development has come a long way with best practices made easier through various tools available on the internet. And with the right tools you can build a website from scratch in less than a day. Don’t worry although this does require a little bit of experience, but web development is relatively easier to pick.
There are tools for creating CSS-based animations, responsive menu generators, apps for collecting stats and sorting CSS, generators for creating pie and circle menus, apps that will calculate EM sizes from PXs, tools for minimizing and cleaning your CSS, resources for generating CSS animations, converters for turning images into base64 encoded strings, generators for creating Flexbox layouts and much, much more.
The best way to speed up the workflow of a device is with tools that will self-regulate your process and contribute towards widening your knowledge. And what if I tell you that you can get all these areas covered and that too for free? Yes. I am going to list down 12 free web-based tools and apps for working with CSS which in one way or the other will help you in finding quick solutions to some of the embittering and time-consuming aspects of working with CSS. Therefore, start bookmarking.
1. CSSREFLEX Frameworks
The team at CSS Reflex has put together a huge frameworks list. Each framework includes a small icon along with details about the license and links to the main site. It’s all organized alphabetically so you can scroll through easily to mark whichever ones you want to try.
2. RawGit
At RawGit, you simply copy the URL of any file in a GitHub repo into this tool, and it’ll spit out a raw content URL with proper headers for embedding into a web page. You can do this with any CSS/JS files in any GitHub repo online. This way you can demo literally any GitHub project without downloading files locally.
3. Animista
This is by far the best CSS animation tool to date. This is a very easy to use tool and quite detailed. It lets you select which styles you want for your animation and auto-generate all the keyframes. You can even pick if you want CSS prefixes or not. Also, this animation editor contains dozens of CSS3 techniques at the click of a button.
4. CSS3 Generator
The CSS3 Generator is one of the best tools for getting quick & easy CSS3 codes in case you forget the syntax or just don’t want to type it all out.
But there is a small drawback. It does not support custom animation with keyframes. Therefore, it works well in combination with Animist. Although it does support the CSS3 transition properties like gradients and flexbox.
5. WP Hasty
WordPress developers are always striving to create the best and WP Hasty is one such commendable achievement of them. It is one of the best and most detailed code generators out there. It has all your work sorted out for you. You just select what you want, pick your settings, and then copy/paste the code right into your functions file. Pretty cool, right? The features include WP menus, custom taxonomies and much more.
6. Meta Tags
Mega tags are information inserted into the “head” area of your web pages information which is not seen by those viewing your pages in browsers. They define the language, the page size for mobile, and many other settings like social features.
It’s a social meta tag generator site where you can input what type of site you have and what type of meta tags you want. It works on Facebook, Pinterest, Google+, LinkedIn and many others.
7. Create CSS3
Create CSS3 is an app that lets you generate the entire CSS3 code. It is quick and easy.
8. Sharing Buttons
If you are planning to add quick and easy buttons for social media onto your site, then Sharing Buttons is the tool for you. Sharing buttons makes it easier for the audience to spread content around the web. It runs with SVG icons and uses HTML for opening new sharing windows. This tool is one of the few social sharing button scripts that gives you a lot many styles to pick from.
9. MJML Framework
Best known for being the only framework that makes responsive email easy, MJML is one of the most favourite tools of many frontend web developers. Frontend developers are often given the task to develop newsletters. Newsletters obviously don’t have the easiest coding standards. This is where MJML framework jumps in to help. It has its own custom syntax for building newsletters. It also has the feature of live editor where you can test your newsletter designs in the browser itself.
10. CodePen
The power of being able to code right in your browser is one of the biggest evolution in web development. And the tool that sits at the top here is CodePen. It is one of the largest communities for web designers and developers to showcase their coding skills. It is a browser-based editor used for testing and showcasing user-created HTML, CSS and JavaScript code snippets. CodePen functions as an online code editor where developers can create code snippets, creatively named “pens”, and then test them. It does not require any specific software. All that you need is a web browser and internet access.
11. Clean CSS
Clean CSS is a free website with tons of small webapps for minifying code, cleaning out duplicate codes, and auto-formatting whatever code you want. Code formatting is a complex task. Although some web developers prefer creating their own scripts to regulate minifying, but it is advised to use someone else’s script as it makes the task a lot easier. Clean CSS is a valuable tool as it has some interesting features. Firstly, it has different apps for different notations like for HTML, CSS, JS and even JSON. Secondly, it keeps getting updated with new tools often which makes it quite resourceful for code cleanup.
12. Panda Reader
A news feed that keeps you inspired and informed, Panda Reader, is the best web-based RSS feed reader with an inclination towards the web design crowd. It is an information tool that facilities discovery by bringing your favourite websites into one place. You can choose among dozens of popular tech & design blogs along with larger sites like GitHub and many more. The feather on the cap is the facility of build-in bookmarking letting you bookmark your favourite snippets from around the web and keeping them organised. ADIOS!
This post gives you an insight into some of the best free web-based tools and apps for CSS. These tools and apps are modern, modular, responsive and cross browser compatible. It is on you to make selection based on performance, ease of use, cross browser compatibility and if it is updated regularly.
Choose wisely.
