For a long time I wanted to make a list of tools that we use, here at xFX JumpStart, not only to maintain our web site but to troubleshoot problems with our customers' menus.

One of the most important things to consider when designing a web site is compatibility among browsers and making sure that your HTML code complies with the W3C standards. For this job we use CSE HTML Validator from AI Internet Solutions.

CSE HTML Validator has helped us make sure that our web site complies with the most fundamental standards and its content is properly presented without errors, but above anything else we use CSE HTML Validator to check for common HTML errors on our customers HTML documents. Such errors are often the cause of problems with the menus generated by DHTML Menu Builder and CSE HTML Validator does an impressive job detecting errors and making suggestions on how to fix them.

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Advanced Web Ranking
After you have spent all the time in the world creating the most awesome menus with DHTML Menu Builder and making sure that your web site complies with the W3C standards you need visitors and to get visitors you need to appear in the search engines; and not only that... you need to appear among the first results and we all know how hard that can be. That's why we use Advanced Web Ranking from Caphyon.

Advanced Web Ranking is a cross platform application that will let you analyze your web site's ranking (position) among every single imaginable search engine based on different queries (keywords).
Generate highly detailed and customizable reports, compare reports to see if your web site's ranking is improving, schedule automatic reports generation... this is by far the most advanced tool in its class and its list of features speaks for it self.

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FireFox + Web Developer Toolbar + FireBug

Besides all the obvious reasons why we primarily use FireFox to test menus, we use it because of two powerful extensions: Web Developers Toolbar and FireBug.

Web Developers Toolbar is an extension that installs as a toolbar giving you quick access to a huge range of options that can help you troubleshoot numerous problems with the menus. Among other stuff, you can easily toggle javascript, disable images, edit, in real-time, the stylesheets on the page, change the browser's resolution, outline specific areas of the page, measure elements, display detailed information about virtually any tag on the page... well, the list is overwhelming. I can honestly tell you that I could live without it.

FireBug is an extremely powerful tool that I often use to check the building blocks (or tags) of a particular element on a page. Simply activate it and then you are able to inspect the very details of each and every element on the page. Among other features, it includes a console were you can execute javascript code (great for troubleshooting as it allows you to evaluate statements in real-time), you can make real-time changes to the HTML code on the page, it improves the error reporting console in FireFox, well, it definitely is an extremely powerful tool.