Free Website Tools
Free Website Tools

Get a free .psd file every day for a year. The website invites designers to give their unused graphics a second life and give them away for free at 356psd.com. You’ll find buttons, arrows, icons, progress bars and more searchable by tags. The site doesn’t state what happens when the year is over…

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

Confused by which browsers support which features of HTML5 and CSS3? Find Me By IP offers a browser compatibility chart for CSS3 properties and selectors and HTML5 web applications, audio and video codecs and form attributes. Their What’s My IP feature also shows what ‘advanced’ features your own browser supports.

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.

Many mobile service providers from around the world offer free e-mail to SMS service (receiver may still be charged). For a list of companies that will allow you to send free SMS from your web applications visit Uptime Robot. It’s not always possible to get internet access to check e-mails, but you can receive an SMS anywhere you can make a call on a cell phone.

Google has it’s own URL shortener at goo.gl. According to Matt Cutt’s blog it was created so Google could use it for its own products, but then they decided to make it available to the public. If you log in to your Google account, you’ll get analytics and history features for the URLs you’ve shortened with number clicks, traffic sources and visitor profiles. Looks like it doesn’t have a feature yet to preview the full URL before clicking on it.

You simply add the URL from the YouTube video or one of several other video services supported at Video2mp3, click convert and it spits it an URL where you can download the mp3 file. This may be working well for lengthy speeches for example that you can then listen to on your mp3 player. There are copyright implications, so be sure to read the terms of service which state that the “illicit exchanges of recordings and protected works as well as the hacking harm artistic creation can result in legal action”. You have to agree to follow all laws and not copy restricted materials.

The web page performance test on WebPageTest.orggives you an overall speed test score with first view and repeat view data. The data is presented in numbers and as a graphic and also offers a full optimization checklist that includes info and tips on images, combining CSS and JS and cookies for example. This comprehensive test also offers the option to test multiple pages and compare them against each other.

Mister Wong’s features the best sites in English, Spanish, French, Russian and German language. Sign up for Mister Wong‘s newsletter to receive a weekly ‘best of’ list of the most popular and useful sites out there. You can choose your language in the footer. Interesting when you compare what’s popular in different countries! If you were looking for another huge and widely popular bookmarking site to promote your own website beyond the US standards, this is it! Also, they just announced that their servers are now running on 33% water generated ‘green’ energy from Norway. Their host is also planting 25 to 30 new trees for each server they run. Nice!

If you’re stuck with your design project and you need to step back and get the big picture, take a look at I Believe in Advertising. It’s a blog with an ongoing list of advertising campaigns from around the world.

See how creative teams come up with yet another clever ad for pest control, cars or household cleaners. The creativity out there is mind boggling! If you’re currently working on a campaign you can submit your own project for inclusion on the site.

Advertising Agency: DraftFCB, Jakarta, Indonesia
Creative Director: Widyalupi Nonis
Art Directors: Defitriadi, Ridward Ongsano
Copywriter: Indah Larasati
DI Artist: Defitriadi
Photographer: Budi Han