Colour resources for web design


ColorCombos.com


colourlovers.com


ColorToy 2.0, a color scheme generator

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November 12, 2008 | Filed Under Useful Sites | 2 Comments 

Firefox extensions for webmasters

When creating or running a website, Firefox combined with some good extensions can be a great time saver. Below is a list of some Firefox extensions that are particularly useful for the webmaster.

FireShot - Take better screenshots of a page in it’s entirety, not just the parts visible on the screen.

Google Cache Checker - Tells you automatically whether a page you are visiting is cached by Google or not.

Adsense Notifier - This saves you from having to constantly login to your Adsense account to check your stats. Instaead you can just glance at the status bar in Firefox and instantly know your earnings for the day.

IE View Lite - Provides a context menu item for opening the current page in IE. Very handy when designing a page and checking to see if it looks good in both browsers.

Search Status - Extensive search-related information about visited web sites, including Google PageRank, Alexa popularity ranking, Compete.com ranking, and backward links from Google, Yahoo, and MSN.

Web directory form filler - Makes the job of submitting your site’s information to web directories easier.

The items on the above list come from Gadget Advisor’s best extensions for Firefox article. Visit Gadget Advisor for more useful articles such as their recommended best Windows software and Blaze Media Pro review

October 29, 2008 | Filed Under Useful Sites | 1 Comment 

Designing your website with Office Live

Here is a bit of an in depth look at how to create your web site with Microsoft® Office Live, a free, browser based site design tool .

Step 1.
After signing up you will be presented with this screen (this is somewhat cropped to only show the parts I want to show at the moment):

I have circled the link you need to click to get started with the design process.

At this point make sure you are not blocking poups because the design tool is in a popup window.

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October 26, 2008 | Filed Under Articles, Beginners, Useful Sites | 3 Comments 

17 browser-based free online website creators

Browser based editors that allow you to create a web site for free and without needing much (or any really) design or HTML knowledge.

Wix - A Flash widget and page creator.
Weebly - Create multipage websites using a drag and drop Ajax interface. Users can then save those websites to a Weebly server or download them for use elsewhere.
Synthasite - An Ajax based drag and drop webpage editor.
Microsoft® Office Live, a free, browser based site design tool with optional free domain name and hosting.
Google Pages - Ajax based simple WYSIWYG web editor.
Sprout - A browser-based tool for creating interactive widgets and web sites in Flash
Jimdo - Another easy to use AJAX site editor. Has a feature for copying other sites’ designs.
Sampa, Babyjellybeans and MyFamily.com - All family oriented, create a personal website, family website or baby website.
Letseat.at - Create a free web site for your restaurant.
SnapPages - Drag and drop text boxes, widgets, photos, calendars and more with an easy to use web page builder.
Pagii - Aims to craft highly stylized personal web pages with drag and drop resizeable widgets. Has social network qualities.
Edicy - An elegant and simple solution to creating web sites.
Sauropol - Create blogs, text pages, image galleries, news lists, document folders, bulletin boards and more.
DoodleKit - Some of these features are available for free, but many will require that you pay
SiteKreator - The free version is a little limited with only 5 design choices.

October 21, 2008 | Filed Under Useful Sites | 5 Comments 

Feng-GUI - Feng Shui for graphic user interfaces

Feng Gui is a useful free service to which you can upload a screenshot of your web site for a computer generated analysis of where human eyes are most likely to look within the first 5 seconds of arriving on the site. This is very useful if you need to make sure your products are visible and don’t just fade into the background.

Visit them at: http://www.feng-gui.com/

October 16, 2008 | Filed Under Useful Sites | Leave a Comment 

Create navigation menus, build forms, banners and more

You may already know about Xara and their range of graphics software but Xara also offers a range of web site addons that can be very useful. Much of this is free but some of the tools do cost money. Below are some of their most useful (in my opinion anyway!) website tools.

The Navbar Maker - Create animated navigation menus. Free or $39/year if you use the upgraded version.

Banner Ad Maker - Create banner ads using their online tool. Free to use or $10/year for the upgraded version.

Value Collection - Has the above included plus 13 more useful tools such as a feedback form creator, text animator and loads more.

Membership Manager - This could be useful to those who run a club or organisation but it is rather pricey at $99/month.

September 15, 2008 | Filed Under Other free graphics, Useful Sites | 1 Comment 

The best blog coaching program at a discount

I wrote about Yaro Starak’s blog coaching program a few days ago. Yaro just informed me that his Blog Mastermind coaching program currently charges in Australian dollars rather then US dollars.

Since the US dollar is anywhere from 5% to 10% stronger than the Aussie dollar as I write this, that’s a 5% to 10% price saving for you if you join Blog Mastermind now.

You can sign-up here.

By now you probably know about Blog Mastermind. Read more

August 5, 2008 | Filed Under News, Useful Sites | 1 Comment 

Free fonts at UrbanFonts

Typography plays a huge part in any design, whether you are simply creating a small personal web site or a professional design for a large corporation. Just like colour choices, a site’s readability adds to the user experience and mood of the design. There are many places on the web which list either paid or free fonts. One of the latest sites to join the party is Urbanfonts.

Urbanfonts lists about 8,000 fonts and dingbats in it’s database, organized into categories such as calligraphy fonts, handwritten, 3D, typewriter, etc.

I think the main feature that sets Urbanfonts apart is the organization of their site which is easy to scan through and find what you are looking for fast. The site is not overrun with popups and while they do have quiet a bit of advertising, they’re not quiet as obtrusive as some free font directories’ ads can be. The site uses some Ajax nicely to display previews when the mouse hovers over words giving you quick loading descriptions and previews of images without having to wait for another whole page to load.

The site also has a fonts blog and forum which adds some extra interest to the site and contains some fairly good reading.

August 4, 2008 | Filed Under Useful Sites | 3 Comments 

PSD to HTML

Many people (myself included) find it much easier to come up with a design concept in Photoshop than to actually do the coding that is involved to turn that design into a HTML web page. I personally find the task time consuming, frustrating at worst and boring at best. I know I’m not the only one to feel this way though which is why services such as W3-markup are popping up to help out. For a very reasonable price you can submit your design as a photoshop PSD file and have it turned into a HTML page for you, complete with CSS and proper markup.

W3-markup’s PSD to HTML service comes with a very neat order form which gives you a quote right then and there depending on the turnaround time, the amount of pages you require and any additional requirements. Simply click the - or + signs, tick the options and the current total updates to reflect your changes. Once you have submitted your design, you can keep in touch with their team via live chat as well as a client area intranet.

So if you are more artistically inclined and somewhat coding challenged or you simply want to save some time, click on over to w3-markup.

May 19, 2008 | Filed Under Useful Sites | 7 Comments 

Free logo design

While I’ve spent close to ten years now offering free templates and backgrounds, I have talked about free hosting, blogs, themes, phplist templates, something that I have not yet covered is logo design.

Logos and branding are equally (if not more) important then any other aspect of web site design and so today I thought I’d cover the subject finally by introducing a free logo design web site.

There are quiet a few other sites offering automated free logo design using a script or program, to me what sets this site apart is that it’s actual human designers who are creating the free logos.

You need to register at the site, pick from a good selection of logo templates, specify your personalization requirements (colour and text) and within a couple of days your logo will be emailed to you in .gif format. If you would like the vector .eps or .ai format the cost is $39.99 but unless you plan to use these files you don’t need to buy them.

You don’t really get much better value for money really so if you are looking for free logos for startups (or anyone) head over to freelogoservices.com to order your logo.

May 6, 2008 | Filed Under Useful Sites | 8 Comments 

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