Free website design tools

Outlined below are some useful web tools that will assist you to check and improve the performance of your own website. None of these tools are required for using your website, however you might find they make your life easier. There are many competing products that provide the same or similar function; these are just a selection. Most of them are free (and in many cases open source). Note that Zeald cannot provide support for the use of third party tools such as these if you have questions regarding the use of them please review their support resources.

Website loading speed

• The Website Speed Checker

Downloading your website for offline use

HTTrack lets you download a copy of your website to use offline (eg at trade shows or anywhere else you want to show your website without an internet connection)

• http://www.httrack.com/

Search engine optimisation tools

• Key Phrase Analyzer
• Meta Tag Analyzer

Spell check tool 

A spelling error or a broken link can instantly breakdown the trust and credibility of your website. Spelling errors and broken links are obvious problems that are easily fixed...The hard bit is finding them. This tool scans your entire website and emails you a full report.

• www.websiteoptimization.com/services/spell-check/

Link Checker FireFox AddOn

Check the validity of links on any webpage. Once you have installed this Addon in FireFox, choose ‘Check Page Links’ in the ‘Tools’ menu or right-click on any webpage using FireFox, to invoke this tool.

• addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/532

The firefox web browser

The latest version of the mozilla browser, the sucessor to Netscape. The firefox web browser is significantly more up-to-date than other browsers (eg Internet Explorer) and is number 2 in market share behind internet explorer - typically between 10-20% of your users will be using firefox.

• http://www.mozilla.com/firefox/

Managing your photos: Google Picassa

Keeping track of your digital photos can be a pain: google provides the picassa image management tool to help with this.

• http://picasa.google.com/

Image editing

Image Optimiser

Batch image resizing

Sometimes it can be very slow to upload a large number of large images, even using the image importer.  This page contains a list of different tools that can be useful for batch-processing images

• http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2008/10/02/15-useful-batch-image-processors/

Web colours

Want to know how to find the code for a web colour. These tools help you find the RGB code which you can then use on your website.

• Eyedropper - Colorzilla
• Colour Picker
• Convert Pantone to RGB