CSS has long ago become an indispensable part of web design. Any web designer will confirm that CSS has become a web standart in recent years.

If you are not a web designer you might ask what CSS is and why is it this popular. Well, per Wikipedia Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a style sheet language used for describing the look and formatting of a document written in a markup language. (HTML or a similar markup language). This is a web design method that allows you to improve your website visitor's experience without costing you time and money.

Key benefits of CSS

• allows you to keep the styling separate from the content
• simplifies the process of changing design elements
• faster load time for your website

As any other technology CSS is developing fast. With the ever growing changes and advancements it's not really a surprise that various useful CSS tools are released every day.

We went and gathered 10 of the free CSS tools that were released recently. Some of them will be of use to the professionals, others will benefit even those who know nothing about web design and development but own an online business and want it to perform better. We hope these tools will make your life easier, just the way they are supposed to.

ExtractCSS

Online tool that extracts ids, classes & inline styles from HTML documents and outputs them as a CSS stylesheet.

Iconizr

This tool will convert any SVG images to a set of CSS icons. You can process up to 50 icons at a time with each icon file being 300 kB or less in size. Icons will be limited to 300 x 300 pixels resolution.

Perfect Icons

A web based tool to create social icons. You don't need to have any coding skills, it's really easy to create custom social icons with this tool. You can even choose colors!

Glyphter

Another online tool, it creates icon fonts from SVGs. You simply need to drag and drop an SVG into the grid and get your icon font.

Typebase.css

LESS & SASS customizable typography stylesheet. This is built to be modified as projects grow and develop.

Responsee II

This is a responsive CSS framework. It's lightweight and intuitive. Websites built with this framework are fully responsive, they correctly display content on all devices.

ProCSSor

This one is a free online CSS optimization tool. Easy in use, this tool will beautify your CSS and shrink the code to make it lighter and thus faster to load.

CSS Lint

Another online and free tool to help you solve any issues with your CSS code. The too performs a static analysis of your code and flags errors or patterns that might cause problems for the developer.

Code Beautifier

This simple CSS cleanup tool does not have any overwhelming and unnecessary features, it accepts pasted or linked CSS and carefully cleans it up. That's it, simple and easy.

CleanCSS

When your code is well-formed and error free this tool will help you make it load even faster by compressing the code to the smallest possible size.

If you'd like to learn more about CSS you might want to read these:

• HTML for Beginners: CSS (Part 9)
• CSS Templates: Freebies, Tutorials and Useful Tools
• CSS Templates: Freebies, Tutorials and Useful Tools
• CSS3: The Missing Manual
• CSS for Beginners: Learn to Tweak Your Website Design
• A Beginner's Guide to HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and Web Graphics