Free Online Tools for Small Business Website Developers
If you are a small business owner and prefer do-it-yourself website design, here’s some advice from a professional designer. Even if someone else does your website, the web design tools reviewed here may help you verify the quality several ways.
A variety of websites provide website developers free online website design tools for testing different aspects of their website designs. Here are some of my favorites with a brief review about each one. Visit these sites and input your page address to view test results.
Accessibility Test at CynthiaSays
Having a website design that meets the WAI requirements for accessibility for handicapped persons to enjoy equal access to website content is one of several sites that perform a quick test. Besides the pass or fail grade, details will point out specific areas to correct if your site fails the test. Verify that this website meets WAI here.
Download royalty free music from The Music Bakery®
Download royalty free music from The Music Bakery® that features professional studio musicians and real acoustic instruments produced by a gifted team of award-winning composers. Covering an entire spectrum of musical styles, it’s production music is logically categorized and easy to find.
Keyword research resources for web design projects are useful to improve SEO. Many search engines provide a way to see into the web’s query stream and discover the most popular search keywords or topics. These keyword research design tools resources for website design should be helpful.
Pingoat is a service which “pings” or notifies multiple services that keep track of weblogs and publish them. When you ping, you are letting the services know your blog has been updated. Then they index and crawl your site, publish your blog contents, therefore increasing the popularity of your blog.
Record and Edit Sounds With Audacity®
Audacity.com is a website with programs for recording audio podcasts. Audacity® is free, open source software that can be used for recording and editing sounds. It is available for Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, GNU/Linux, and other operating systems.
Search Engine Simulator at Willmaster.com
Website designs are viewed one way by human visitors who actually see your content. Search engines only access your code and do not view graphics, so aesthetics are great for the humans. Use this free tool and search engine simulator to see how your website is viewed by crawlers, and then look for clues to improve your website design.
You can use AnalogX Script Defender to protect your computer from viruses. This program only needs to be run once and will watch incoming scripts so you make sure you don’t run potentially destructive scripts (such as an email virus) by accident.
The importance of creating valid code in your website designs to meet the standards of W3C is overlooked by some website designers. Perfect code may not be necessary for your site to display well, but if you can fix the problems use the data from the W3C validator to correct errors or warnings. You may want to test your CSS here, too.
Website Evaluation at URL Trends
Get a full report with a summary of your website’s pagerank, major links, page description, date created if known, and more which gets updated monthly at URL Trends. An interesting function at URL Trends is the “wayback machine” which links to the display of old versions of websites if available in their cache. While this data is helpful, the monthly updates are backdated several months.
If you have any questions about creating code valid to W3C standards, how to analyze trend reports, the importance of accessibility in website design, or the results of the search engine simulator, feel free to email us for a no obligation evaluation.