Planet CakePHP

Web coding can be quite tricky at times, figuring out how you want your website to look and where your visitors are coming from. Here’s a compilation of the most helpful free tools on the web to make your website better.
Google Analytics
Google analytics is a web application which gives you an enormous amount of insight about your traffic and visitors, from what browsers they’re using to how long they stay on your site. It tracks data over time and lets you see how your web traffic has changed. It shows you where your visitors are coming from and more. I highly recommend using Google Analytics.
Google Webmaster Tools
Google Webmaster Tools is another web application by Google which allows you to directly interact with the Google search engine. For instance, you can submit site maps for the Google bot to index and you can see if the Google bot picks up any 404s or other errors while crawling your site. In addition to all this is lets you see your site’s keywords and see what people are searching that brings up your site. I recommend this more for bigger sites because it’s not very accurate for smaller sites.
Color Scheme Designer
Color Scheme Designer is a web application to pick out color schemes. It features several different types of color schemes and allows you to export your themes so you can show them to friends. In addition to all this you can see how the colors look to color blind people. I recommend this tool for web designers that need some color inspiration.
Mockingbird
Mockingbird is a web application that lets you create rough drafts of websites without any code involved and share it with other people. It’s a very neat application, ideal for communicating your website thoughts to others.
YSlow
YSlow, by Yahoo!, is a Firefox plugin which analyzes your websites speed and gives you tips on how you can improve its speed. It’s a nifty little tool and I recommend it especially if you’re aiming for speed.
Websecurify
Websecurify is a cross-platform desktop application which can rip through your web application, checking for security flaws and potential exploits. I strongly recommend using this if your web application is complex or was developed by multiple people.
IETester
IETester is another very useful desktop application for Windows. It allows you to view websites in Internet Explorer 5.5, 6, 7 and 8. This is a really handy tool when making sure your site is cross-browser.
Firebug
Firebug is a Mozilla Firefox extension that gives you plenty of web development tools and features. Firebug has a built-in JavaScript debugger that lets you step through your script as well as allowing you to perform benchmarks to see why your script is slow/sluggish.
You can quickly hunt down CSS, HTML, JavaScript, and XML errors through Firebug, and it even allows you to filter and search for specific errors. Another handy feature is the DOM inspector pane which outlines a web page’s structure; very handy if you’re working on a big website or an open-source application that you’ve recently gotten involved with. It’s an awesome tool though I find that disabling Firebug when I’m not using it is helpful in speeding up normal browsing (such accessing Gmail, for example).
Web Developer extension for Firefox
Web Developer extension is a very handy and time-saving extension for Firefox. I’ve written and recommended it plenty of times and is an extension that I use daily. You can rapidly validate your XHTML, find JavaScript/CSS errors, visualize a web page’s structure, quickly fill out web forms for testing purposes, clear your cache with a shortcut key, change XHTML on-the-fly (great for working remotely on a web design), inspect HTTP headers information, and much more.