Useful Free Tools For Website Designers

[jhilgeman]

I always happen upon nifty gadgets that I end up keeping, and I always look for free things. So here's a thread for posting your free or inexpensive (hopefully under $15) gadgets - free preferred.

WindowSizer
Cost: FREE! (hurray!)
URL: http://www.mlin.net/misc.shtml

I've been using this litle gadget for about 2 months now - I've put it in my Quick Launch bar, and it comes in real handy when testing site resolutions.

When you run it, it displays a list of open windows/applications. You simply select a window that you'd like to resize, and it'll show you the current size of the window. Just change that size to the desired size (like 800 pixels wide to test for 800x600), and press "Set" and it's changed.

It's small, free, and proven to be useful to me. I hope others find it useful, too.

- Jonathan

[ranjan]

Cost : Free
URL : http://asia.cnet.com/downloads/pc/sw...009823s,00.htm

SLUGS is a colour picker which can run on its own or as an HTML-Kit plugin. It can make suggestions of colours which look nice with the selected colour. Features include HSL and RGB pickers, a 'grab screen colour' picker, support for many popular output formats and semi-intelligent scheme suggestions.

[ranjan]

Cost : Free
URL : http://www.chami.com/html-kit/

HTML-Kit is a full-featured editor designed to help HTML, XHTML and XML authors to edit, format, lookup help, validate, preview and publish web pages. Newcomers to web page design can benefit from letting it point out errors and provide suggestions on how to create standards compliant pages. Experts can save time spent on common tasks using the highly customizable and extensible integrated development environment while maintaining full control over multiple file types including HTML, XHTML, XML, CSS, XSL, JavaScript, VBScript, ASP, PHP, JSP, Perl, Python, Ruby, Java, VB, C/C++, .NET C#, Delphi / Pascal, Lisp, SQL, and more.

[ranjan]

Cost : Free
URL : http://aprompt.snow.utoronto.ca/

A-Prompt will ensure that client Web sites are accessible to the largest number of potential visitors – including those with disabilities. The tool's evaluation and repair checklist is based on accessibility guidelines created and maintained by the Web Accessibility Initiative of the World Wide Web Consortium.

[jhilgeman]

Some more web-based tools:

Page Size Bookmarklet
Cost: FREE!
URL: http://www.q42.nl/research/

This handy tool is a little different. It's not a regular program - it's a Javascript URL. You simply add it to your favorites and whenever you are on a web page and you want to see the total size of the web page (including the size of each component), you click on that favorite, and a little popup will appear and show you all the detailed info. This is great if you're trying to manage the size of your pages.

By the way, don't bookmark the above URL - that's just the homepage that offers the program. You need to go to http://www.q42.nl/research/ and follow their instructions. It's REALLY easy and REALLY useful.

You can find other bookmarklets at:
http://www.bookmarklets.com/tools/categor.html

Keyword Density Analyzer
Cost: FREE!
URL: http://www.keyworddensity.com/

Just go to the site, put in a URL, and it'll look at your page and show you keyword densities (if you're doing SEO work). Simple, free, and useful.

Overture Search Term Suggestion Tool
Cost: FREE!
URL: http://inventory.overture.com/d/sear...ry/suggestion/

Shows you how many searches were done last month for a particular keyword or keyphrase, as well as many other related keywords and phrases. This one doesn't require you to "validate" yourself by typing in that annoying image-code thing.

[jhilgeman]

If I may make one more suggestion to make this a more useful thread - please try to limit suggestions to simple tools and gadgets. Nothing full-featured, even if it's a great product.

I think it's more useful to have tools that are small and fast to learn - things that you can start using within a few seconds. :)

- Jonathan

[carbonize]

Best free tool for web designers is Mozilla Firebird. With the right extensions, such as web developer, you can have it resize it's self, let you edit a sites CSS live, check the pages HTML/CSS with a multitude of sites.

This handy tool is a little different. It's not a regular program - it's a Javascript URL. You simply add it to your favorites and whenever you are on a web page and you want to see the total size of the web page (including the size of each component), you click on that favorite, and a little popup will appear and show you all the detailed info. This is great if you're trying to manage the size of your pages.

Mozilla Firebird and standard Mozila offer page info which gives you info such as page size, encoding, render mode, page links, the url of all images on the page, and more.

[jhilgeman]

Tsk, tsk! What about my desperate plea for no full-featured programs...? :)

- Jonathan

[vfaulkner]

As this pertains to what my site is all about, free/lowcost resources, and am always looking for more....
:-)

[carbonize]

Tsk, tsk! What about my desperate plea for no full-featured programs...? :)

- Jonathan

It's a web browser. If a web designer can't use a web browser then there's something seriously wrong. You have to be able to use a web browser for your javascript url do you not?

All of the features I mentioned are accessed, once the extension is installed, by a simple right click on the screen. Installing the extensions is simply a matter of going to the extensions page, which is listed in bookmarks, and clicking the install link for the extension you want.