Web Services and Tools for Website Designers

Published: 6 Mar 2009 In: Website Design

A good designer is only as good as his/her web tools.

Between website design projects, I get a chance to wander the web and I have found some very helpful web services and tools that go into a quick access bookmark toolbar. Over the years we have collected quite a library of useful tools.

Here is my list of web services and tools that have helped make my life easier as a website designer.

Making Sure Things are Working

Are My Sites Up
Are My Sites Up will track you sites to make sure they are still online. The free service allows you to track up to 20 sites and can notify members via email or SMS. Site checks are done up to 25 times per day.
The premium service will check up to 60 sites as often as every 15 minutes and comes with all features of the free service plus Twitter integration and RSS feeds.
Down for Everyone or Just Me
This service will help you determine if any problems with a specified site are happening for all visitors, or only for you. This is a nice web tool for determining if you have firewall problems.

Productivity and Planning

Creative Pro Office
This is a great little suite for managing multiple projects and multiple resources across those projects. Better yet, this web tool is free. It offers Client management, Project management, Resource management at multiple levels, and Financial management modules. We use this web tool to manage our projects and it has proven to be a great help at keeping our web services well delivered and organized.

ScrnShots
This web tool provides an easy way to take, find, and share screen shots of websites or anything else displayed on your screen. You can upload screen shots to your own account, retrieve screen shots, or search others screen shots by keywords.

You can even embed screen shots in your website at full size or thumbnail size. This is also a great web tool to share your conceptual ideas with your website design customers.

HTML Ipsum
Lorem Ipsum
When putting together a website design, it just doesn’t look right unless there is some textual content to show exactly how the design is going to flow. These two web services easily generate any combination of dummy text for you.

HTML Ipsum is good for quick content for paragraphs, lists, tables or any other combination where you need to quickly populate it with some text. Lipsum allows you to customize your output a little bit. They even offer some Lipsum banners for testing out those advertising banner areas of the website.

Graphics, Drawing, Images and Design Tools

Color Scheme Designer
This is a very nice web tool that allows you to select a primary design color and create a color scheme to match. The results are very nice and provides some good ideas for color schemes that I ordinarily wouldn’t have thought of without the tool.

Golden Ratio Calculator
If you don’t know about the Golden Rule of design, you still have a way to go in website design. This tool is a necessity to making your web pages have that indescribable feature that makes people really like the look of your website.

The have a downloadable tool for Mac users, but the online version works well for the rest of us. Simply enter in the width of an area and let the web tool calculate all of the combinations that fit around your number to make it part of the “Golden Rule”.

HTM2PDF
This was a tough one to categorize. It is not really a website design tool, but it is useful in dealing with your customers.

This web tool allows you to convert a web page by entering its URL or you can simply cut and paste the RAW HTML code. They also offer a bookmarklet to convert websites you visit on the fly. They are developing some other tools that you may want to keep an eye on as well. We noticed a screen shots tools and a tools to resize images on the fly. Should be interesting.

Snipplr
A whole slew of useful code snippets for those redundant, but necessary tasks. Example – Country Drop Down List for Web Forms

Web 2.0 Logo Creatr
We love this tool. If your on the road, or just in need of a quick, but impressive web 2.0 style logo design, this web tool provides the goods. Creatr takes all of the hassles of learning an application out of the equation and concentrates on what the designer is after.

The best part is that this is not the only web tool provided, making this a web service. You can also create your own web 2.0 background. They also have a blog button web service as well to easily create those small but effective buttons for your blog.

Finance and Money

Project Estimator
Even though this tool is not intended to provide estimates directly to prospective web clients nor is it intended to generate finished proposals, its output is certainly client worthy. The tools works well for determining (roughly) an estimate for developing a website … or any project you might have for that matter. Each line item is customizable as well as the title and standard rate.

This is one of those web tools that is good to keep around because you will use it at some point.

Social Networking

TweetDeck
Now this is an odd addition to our set of tools and it is very recent. We have started to use Twitter to interact with our clients, and potential clients. TweetDeck has proven to be the most effective way for us to use Twitter to accomplish this.

This web tool allows you to setup several windows to monitor the various types of Twitter communication between you and your followers, or followees. The combination of this tool and Twitter has seen a significant increase in traffic to our web sites. Any tool that can help drive visitors to our site and make them customers is worth a look. This one comes highly recommended.

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