Tools

Once you're working on a project, here are some great tools to save you time and energy.

HTML/CSS

Bootstrap: CSS framework to make website-building a (relative) breeze

Color Wheel: Find colors that look great together

Animate.css: Easy text animations

Licensing your work and collaborating

Licensing sounds boring, but it's the best way to keep your code open to others. If you don't provide a license, your work is presumed to be fully copyrighted and therefore closed to others. Code for DC recommends keeping your license in a LICENSE.md file. If any explanation is necessary for contributions by others, we recommend including that in your readme or in a separate CONTRIBUTING.md file.

Choose A License

Frameworks for sites and web apps

Frameworks allow you to create templates and scripts for a dynamic site

Jekyll: The web framework used by Github Pages; probably most useful if you are using that for hosting

Django: A full-featured framework built on Python

Flask: Another Python framework; fewer features and less powerful, but simpler to set up

Express: A Node-based framework

Sinatra: A Ruby-based framework

Javascript Libraries

jQuery: Add interactivity to your site

Moment: Work with dates easily

Typeahead: Autocomplete functions for forms

Underscore: Additional Javascript functionality to make programming simpler

Hosting

Heroku: Apps with low data needs are free, and the price after that scales with usage

Dotcloud: Another hosting option

Github Pages: Your code already lives there and hosting is free, but all of your information will be out in the open (if passwords, etc. are required, this can be a security risk).