Need Tips, Tricks and Freebies for website building?

Today I’m putting together a small list of web sites and free tools that I use for web design.

Free Software

The best free text editor I have found is Notepad++ from sourceforge.net This program is so small it will run on a flash drive and has support for all programmin laguages.

Need just a quick resize of an image or a screenshot? Try XnView, it loads fast and does jpeg lossless tranformations, batch conversions, other neat features for slide shows, screenshot feature gives you options for the whole page or to draw a rectangle to capture just the area you need.

The other software I use for screen shots is ScreenRip32. Unfortunately it will not work on anything newer than Windows XP, not even XP Pro, but it works great running from my flash drive! I used it extensively to build my first website to aquire the product images from the manufacturers’ websites when they didn’t have product image downloads available.

Web Sites

My favorite color wheel site www.ficml.org You can choose up to 7 colors and have them show in a column. That’s a very useful feature when choosing colors for a web page. You will see instantly if the colors work together. It also shows if it is a web safe color, web smart or an unsafe color which will not show correctly.

COLOR TIPS:
True silver color #c0c0c0, for a a bronze look try #bc4300

Codes not working right? Can’t find the error? No matter how long you stare at the code you just can’t see it? Try validating at www.w3.org

I still use sitepoint Check out some of the really cool things you can do with latest in CSS3.

Work with PHP and MySQL? My all time favorite PHP forum is atCode Walkers. Very helpful community.

One more for PHP is phpfreaks. Just reading the post and answers can sometimes solve your problem!

For MIDI and mp3 files I use ez-tracks for general tunes and rats2u.com for Holiday music. Be sure to use a disposable email to register as they do sell email addresses.

Best Tool of All

My Firefox browser! Loaded with all of the toolbars for web developement. I design and check my work with the tools in Firefox, then check the look of the pages in IE, Chrome and Safari. It saves a lot of time for me.

That’s all I can come up with for now. Until next time, see you later!