Free Website Tools
Free Website Tools

Start your own question and answer site easily with free open source software at osqa.net. Use this software for homework sites, product support or as a help desk feature. This question and answer engine features a voting system, social networking functions including private messaging, search, the ability to import data from a Stack Exchange site, support for widgets, themes, the ability to embed videos, audio and images, automatic site activity reports, export data and more.

If you’re working on a project that uses location names, you can use Geonames.org for your research and to download databases of location names from around the world free of charge. GeoNames integrates geographical data such as names of places in various languages, elevation, population and more from various sources.

This geographical database is available for download free of charge under a creative commons attribution license. It contains over 10 million geographical names and consists of 7.5 million unique features, 2.8 million populated places and 5.5 million alternate names. It also offers some population and area statistics. According to the site Geonames users include Ubuntu, Apple’s SnowLeopard, Bing Maps, The New York Times and more.

How accessible is your site to folks with disabilities? You can find out easily with the web accessibility checker at the International Center for Disability Resources on the Internet website at ICDRI.org.

Simply put, accessibility means making resources usable by the largest number of people possible. Techniques used to make the Internet and Web accessible can range from very simple, like adding the ‘alt’ or ‘longdesc’ attribute, to the more complex, like changing scripts, navigation and structure of a site.

When we used the web accessibility checker to test our site the results resembled a to-do list with instructions. Changing the ‘alt’ attribute for images came up several times. This is a reminder that a text equivalent for every non-text element should be provided and the use of the word ‘image’ or ‘.jpg, .gif, .bmp, .jpeg’ within the text should be avoided, which makes sense because it’s not descriptive of what the image actually is. The text used within the ‘alt’ attribute should also be shorter than 81 characters.

Applying these techniques will help a visually impaired person access the content of a web page with software which will read text and describe the images it encounters on the page.

Other suggestions that may come up when you test your site are that redundant text links should be provided for each active region of a server-side image map; and that row and column headers should be identified for data tables for example.

For resources on making your site more accessible, including a Section 508 checklist, visit the ICDRI’s accessibility primer page.

Not sure about how that saying went, or what pronoun to use with a specific expression? If you’re a native English speaker, or you’ve learned English as a foreign language, Netspeak is a great tool for improving your writing.

Enter the beginning of a phrase into the search box and the different and most frequent ways that phrase or expression are used is shown. You can sort the results by the most frequent order of the words, and the most common option. It doesn’t mean that the results you’ll get are the correct way an expression is used, but they are the most frequent and common ways an expression is used.

Whether you’re analyzing for keyword density or trying to improve your writing by identifying words you seem to overuse, Textalyser.net can help. You either copy and paste your text to be analyzed or enter an URL and then set analyzing options like minimum characters per word, special word or expression to analyze, log the query (only for websites), apply stoplist and more. This is a simple, but very useful tool for analyzing any text on or off the web.

Try it out here:

Is it e-book or eBook? With all these internet terms, who can keep up with what’s considered the correct spelling? Well, why not find out from an authority on writing, namely the Associated Press which publishes the AP Stylebook, also known as” the journalist’s bible.” They have a few resources accessible for free, including a very useful Ask the Editor FAQ Guide. So which one is it? OK, we’ll tell you here: it’s supposed to be e-book and not eBook, meaning it needs a hyphen, as all other e- expressions do. But, it’s email and not e-mail, which is the only exception. Why the difference?

From their website: “AP’s acceptance of email reflects the reality of usage. Other e- terms, which aren’t as widely used in daily discourse, are clearer with the hyphenated spellings. Thus AP is sticking with e-business, e-commerce and others that abbreviate electronic.”
Including e-book.

Google’s first SEO Starter guide is a no-nonsense guide to optimize your website for search engines. It includes instructions for writing page titles, info on navigation and URL structure, best practices, how to make use of the meta description tag and making sure your mobile site gets indexed. The updated version of the Google SEO Guide follows the same format, but promises the following additions/improvements:
* Glossary to define terms throughout the guide
* More example images to help you understand the content
* Ways to optimize your site for mobile devices
* Clearer wording for better readability

If you need quick information on US copyrights and what they mean for your website or web business, read “10 Big Myths About Copyright Explained” at Templeton’s website. You’ll get a quick rundown on when something is considered copyrighted, what’s considered fair use, the idea of public domain, creating work based on another’s work and about quoting text from another site. The site also has info on the basics of copyright. For the ‘full’ version of copyrights information, visit the government site at copyright.gov.

Have you received a cease and desist notice asking you to take down content from your website, or stop engaging in an activity? Before you take action, inform yourself about your online rights at ChillingEffects.org. Chilling Effects aims to help you understand the protections that the First Amendment and intellectual property laws give to your online activities. While there are of course lawful claims, it seems that some individuals and corporations are using intellectual property and other laws to attempt to silence legitimate online activity for various reasons.

The website offers explanations of the law for people whose websites deal with topics such as Fan Fiction, Copyright, Domain Names and Trademarks, Anonymous Speech, and Defamation. It is a joint project of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Harvard, Stanford, Berkeley, University of San Francisco, University of Maine, George Washington School of Law, and Santa Clara University School of Law clinics. It allows you to submit your materials you have received (with personal info removed) which will then be posted on the site along with comments about its legal implications.

If you search for SEO on the web, it pretty much always means ‘search engine optimization’ or similar. But what else does SEO mean? If you regularly work with web content and keywords, it maybe helpful to find all meanings of acronyms you’re using with acronymfinder.com. You’ll be surprised to find 27 other verified meanings of SEO with over 200 more in their ‘Acronym Attic’. Got a minute? See the different meanings of PHP, omg or PPC. Results are categorized and split up between verified and unverified meanings.