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Web Design Toolbox
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When
you're into your web design, there
are lots of little programs that you'll
gradually accumulate to make your life that
little bit easier. When you've spent hours
doing something by hand and you're dreading
ever having to do it again, it can be a big
relief to learn that there's a free program
out there that can do it quickly and
effectively for you the next time.
Colour Programs
One of the thorniest issues you'll run
into in web design is colour. Because web colours
are all expressed in the somewhat mysterious HTML colour
(#000000 to #FFFFFF), it can be hard to get the exact
colours you want in your design. Don't be fooled into
thinking there aren't many to choose from: those colours
are in hexadecimal, meaning that each one of those six
numbers can have a value anywhere from 0-F (that is,
0-9, A-F). 16 possible values to the power of 6 makes
over 16 million possible colours – that's 24-bit colour,
not bad at all.
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So, really, instead of trying out
millions of colours by hand to see which you like best,
it's much better to download an HTML colour picker tool
– an essential part of every web designers toolbox. It
might sound like they'd be very simple, but there are
all sorts of features they can have: suggesting
'complementary colours' to the one you've chosen, for
example. Some let you take a picture of your screen and
click on parts of it to see which HTML colour is being
used – useful when you see a colour somewhere that you
think would work great on your website.
My personal favourite colour program is
Color Schemer, available at www.colorschemer.com – it
has all the features you could really want in an HTML
colour picker. If you're after something free, though,
you might like to try the more compact Pixie, from
www.nattyware.com/pixie.html, which sits in the corner
of your screen and tells you the colour code of any
colour you hover over.
HTML Checkers
There's not much competition when it
comes to HTML checking: what you really need is the
W3C's HTML Tidy, or one of the many programs based on it
(see http://tidy.sourceforge.net/). Tidy can clean up
truly disastrous HTML, including the kind of thing
produced by many of the more popular editor programs
like Dreamweaver, and applications like Microsoft Word.
Even if you think your code is great, the chances are
that Tidy will be able to make it smaller and better.
Mozilla Firefox Extensions
When you use Firefox as your web browser,
you gain access to lots of extensions that you can
install quickly and easily. Since so many people using
the browser are web designers, there are more extensions
available for web development tasks than there are for
anything else. This makes Firefox an ideal browser to
use when you're writing a website.
Which extensions are most useful? Here's
a quick list:
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Web Developer's Toolbar (http://chrispederick.com/work/firefox/webdeveloper/).
This is the most useful Firefox extension out there
for web designers. Its best feature is that it lets
you experiment with CSS styles 'live', so the style
of your page changes as you do it – a great way to
write CSS. |
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LinkChecker (http://www.kevinfreitas.net/extensions/linkchecker/).
You absolutely must check your website for broken
links, but it's usually quite a chore. Because
LinkChecker integrates with the browser, it can
check your links for you on-the-fly. It highlights
working links in green and broken ones in red.
Simple, but very effective. |
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HTML Validator (http://users.skynet.be/mgueury/mozilla/).
Lets you check whether your pages are valid HTML
without having to type all their URLs into an online
validity checker. Takes a lot of the pain out of
code validation, which makes you more likely to
actually bother to do it! |
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SearchStatus (http://quirk.co.za/searchstatus/).
When you're trying to monitor your site's position
in search engines, this extension is indispensible.
It shows you the Google PageRank and Alexa ranking
for your site, giving you an idea of both the link
popularity and traffic the site gets. It also lets
you check who links to your site, and whether the
search engines have added it to their index yet. |
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