TextMate – If you wanna design a great site then you need to get down to the nitty gritty, and that means hand coding everything. After trying a slew of freeware and non-freeware editors I’ve finally landed on TextMate. It’s incredibly lightweight, formats code nicely, and makes managing several projects a breeze. Unfortunately TextMate is only for Macs so if you’re on a PC your out of luck :( Head over to Smashing Magazine and read their article on 25 Useful WYSIWYG Editors Reviewed. You may find a good alternative.

Photoshop – Although incredibly expensive, Photoshop is a must have if you want the fancy graphics to go along with your badass code. There are definitely other freeware options out there but Photoshop has a great set of tools specific for web design and optimizing graphics.

Firefox – Firefox is a web designers best friend. Not only does it display HTML and CSS correctly, there are a wide range of plugins that make the process of debugging a hell of a lot easier, number one on my list being Firebug. By allowing you to edit styles and HTML right within the browser, it allows you to quickly make tweaks to reach the desired effect. It really is WYSIWYG. In addition to Firebug, FireFTP is an amazing FTP client perfect for quickly uploading files as you work. If your using version control and need to edit directly through FTP you may want to try something like Cyberduck along with TextMate. Lou Zell has a great article on how to set that up.

* If you’re on a Mac testing your site on Internet Explorer can be a bit of a pain. Services like Browsershots can be useful, but painfully slow. If you want to immediately check cross browser compatibility I would recommend running a virtual desktop with VMware or Parallels. These are particularly useful because you can have Windows running in a separate window allowing you to quickly check all the nightmares IE has in store for you.

What’s in your toolbox? Hit up the comment section!