Jun

A host of practical tips if you're site building

So much stuff, where to put it?

I get passed so many useful links and web pages that it’s sometimes difficult to know how to process them all.

They’re usually stuffed with great tips and info, but they get added to favourites and often never see the light of day again.

This blog can be quite cathartic – it’s great to get them recorded and grouped somewhere where they can be useful to me and everybody else.

So this post is a trip down ‘favourites alley’ … an attempt by me to share some useful links for people building websites.

2 links, 17 tips!

Here are two for starters.

Firstly 7-clever-google-tricks-worth-knowing, including a long list of advanced and cool search techniques for websites and images.

Secondly ten-tips-for-web-design-magic which looks at good and bad things about web design firms … useful if you’re going to hire one, useful too if you are one and want to be better!

Links Heaven

Okay 5 more now, no particular theme here, just 5 sites that friends have passed on which I feel the need to share.

I’d never heard of them and you might find that you haven’t either:

http://www.flashbuttons.com/ … want some fancy Flash buttons but not sure how to create them? Take a look at this site where the flash buttons are free and created in a browser, rather than by downloading software.

http://www.shrinkpictures.com/ … I recommend this website to clients who haven’t got photo editing software, or have limited experience of resizing images. It’s useful for kids too if they’re starting out making their own sites. It all takes place in a browser (ie no software to download) and once again it’s free (have you noticed how much I like that word?)

http://bookletcreator.com/ … I haven’t found a use for this – yet – but it’s a nice idea and it must be useful for someone. It’s a free online tool that allows you to create a booklet from a PDF document. It re-orders pages so that after printing and folding the pages you get a small book. great … but I haven’t used it yet.

http://fotopic.net/ … there are many sites for photo storage these days, but this one has a shop and photo printing services built around your photos, so people can get your pictures printed on t-shirts and mugs and you make money into the bargain.

http://www.dynamicdrive.com/ … if you’re trying to do something really ambitious, like putting a rotating image gallery on your site, and your teccie skills aren’t quite up to it, this is a site to look at. It provides all sorts of useful scripts, and I’ve certainly used this one in the past.

While I was refreshing my memory to write this blog, I also found a solution to a current problem I’m having.

In a previous posting I was trying to work out how to make an intergrated 16×16 and 32×32 favicon … look what I found on this site:

http://tools.dynamicdrive.com/favicon/

I told you it was useful