Just started a website and eager to make it look and work better? Here is the first set of tools you’ll need to start digging through the spaghetti of code that’s hidden behind the back-office interface.
The browser
I’ve got four that I use for normal work: Firefox, Chrome, Opera, and Tor.
- I like Firefox for its privacy settings and I’ve been used to it for many years.
- Chrome I use because it’s the only one that can handle complex formulas on Google Sheets, especially when cell contents include special characters like ?, # and ~
- Opera I use for whenever I’m willing to see ads, which is most of my research.
- Tor I use because it lets me test for ranking in different countries and has full anonymity. Google searches thus show me more “neutral” results when checking on how my own site competes.
With the browser you check and use your site as a normal user would. On top of that, it’s also:
- the gateway to searching for how to code (and find forgotten syntax, shortcuts, etc)
- an access point for your website back-office (the WordPress dashboard and editing pages)
- an access point for other cloud-based or server-based software (git monitoring, servers, etc.)
The Text editor
All code is text. Everything that runs the website, in the end, is a text file. Notepad works fine, but when files are more than 10 lines long, better software can help. These are called Integrated Development Environments, or IDE for short. Full-blown ones include error identification, syntax correction and auto-completion. Lighter ones only include coloring (gray for commands and red for strings, for instance) and automatic ind
I use Sublimetext, which color-codes certain languages and helps clarify code with indention and the like.
The Local Server Developer software
It’s theoretically possible to just change files and upload them to the production server manually, but it would certainly crash the website if the changes weren’t tested beforehand. So to work on the changes and check that they work at a very basic level, you need to set a local server up on your computer.
That’s what the local server software helps you do. It usually does more than simply being a local server: it often helps you gather the original website from the remote server, and forward any modifications to it when you’re ready. In that sense, it also doubles as a File Transfer Software, or FTP software.
Since I run a WordPress site and I use Windows (I know) on my computer, I went for Local, which is related to WordPress itself.