A toolbox with a mallet and various small tools arranged in a disorderly fashion

Web Development Tools and Resources

Over the decade of time we’ve spent building web marketing powerhouses, we’ve learned a thing or two about how to build on the web. This is a non-exhaustive list of the software we use to build, host, and power our websites.

Feedbucket

Feedbucket is software we use with our partners to solicit and manage feedback during design rounds. It’s easy to install, user friendly, and very utilitarian - no crazy email marketing bugging you every day, no upselling, and no AI. It’s practical and good at what it does.

Cloudways

Cloudways is our preferred hosting platform because they’re cheap, scalable, fast, and easy to use. They have great customer support and are able to host every type of app. They’re most commonly known as a WordPress host and they do have an excellent platform for that, with one-click installs and migrations, staging site management, and excellent cache control to speed up sites. They also have multiple server setups, the ability to install multiple apps on a single server, Node app hosting, and support for so much more.

WordPress

If you build on the web, you need to know WordPress. It’s ubiquitous, so there are resources out there that solve almost any problem - though we do find those ones that creep up on us. Luckily, the platform is also extremely well documented, so when we hit a wall, we can easily find solutions to what we’re looking to accomplish. Support for the platform is great and there’s a dense community supporting further development of themes, plugins, and the WordPress core itself. In 2025, it’s easy enough to install and configure, get a builder that works for clients and ourselves, and install performance software to make the site performant in less time than it takes the average American to get to and from work every day (about 1 hour). This time-to-live is impressive and part of why we continue to build on WordPress today.

Website Development Software

We use a whole suite of tools and websites to power our day-to-day operations:

Sublime Text

Our text editor of choice. It’s lightweight, extendable, and very customizable. We like how bare-bones it is. We use the SFTP extension to sync local & remote repositories.

FileZilla

For larger FTP operations, we use FileZilla. There’s probably something more modern that can be used, but if ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

Node SASS

We author SCSS that compiles to CSS using Node SASS. This command-line tool is easy to use and includes a bunch of useful options, including automatic minification, which is great for production sites.

MAMP

This is a local server that runs Apache, MySQL, and PHP on our machines. Yes, we use Macs, so this is what we need. If we were on Windows, we’d use XAMPP. We use the pro version for local SSL & distinct environments.

Screaming Frog

This SEO tool (with a free tier) is a great way to identify problems and likely fixes on sites. When we launch a new site, we immediately run an audit here to make sure bots see the site we want them to.

Postman

An API testing tool that enables headache-free auditing while building. As long as you have a public endpoint, Postman get send & test requests. This is great not only for testing as you build your API, but also for generating and ingesting responses when working locally.

GiMP

AKA GNU Image Manipulation Program. This is a photoshop replacement we use for editing & creating images. We’re not photoshop experts, so we are no power-users, but this tool is great for quick work like cropping, resizing, and composing images. We can also using it for converting file types, but most often, we use another tool for that.

WebP Encoder

The cwebp command-line tool easily compresses and converts images to a webp format. It’s the best compression tool we’ve used and provides the quickest compression at no cost. It’s local, so you also don’t need an internet connection to make it work.

Real Favicon Generator

The Real Favicon Generator has been around since around 2013. We've used it to generate the necessary favicon files & HTML since then. It's the most robust tool that stays updated to support the widest range of browsers. We like to hold on to a lot of knowledge, but when we can offload it, we do, and this is a process that we need to get right.

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