Published January 18th, 2010 in Tools
Almost every website needs some type of form, whether it be a contact/feedback form, a registration form, a survey, or an order form. Despite the fact that forms are a necessity for just about every project, designers and developers can often be frustrated by the process of creating them, especially more advanced forms.
There are a number of resources available that have been created to make it easier for designers, developers, and website owners to quickly and easily create attractive, usable forms without the need to code. In this post we’ll look at some of the best options available.
The resources featured in this post include some free options and a number of paid options. Most of the paid options include a lot of features, and in many cases the ability to integrate your forms with PayPal or other payment gateways.
Resources for Creating Forms:
FormSpring
With FormSpring you can create standard contact forms, set up surveys, accept donations, manage event registrations and more. The form builder will allow you to easily create forms without the need for coding, and FormSpring helps you to manage the data that is collected through the forms (store in a database, export to Excel, or use the API). You can even use a payment integration feature. A free plan is available that allows 3 forms with 10 fields and 50 saved entries per month, and paid plans range from $14 – $159 per month.
Published December 2nd, 2009 in Tools
Tooltips provide opportunities to give website visitors additional information without creating added clutter on the page. There are plenty of tooltip scripts available that can be used in your own work. In this post we’ll feature 35 options.
Prototip 2
Allows you to easily create both simple and complex tooltips using the Prototype javascript framework.
Published March 31st, 2009 in Tools
Navigation menus are important to any website. Well designed navigation can improve the look and appearance of a site as well as the usability. For larger sites with a lot of content or pages, drop down menus are popular because the can make it easier to move through the site with less clicks. In this post we’ll feature 25 scripts for drop down menus that you can use on your own site.
jQuery Multi Level CSS Menu #1
Published June 16th, 2008 in Tools
For web designers and graphic designers, gradients provide almost unlimited options for creating the perfect look. This list is a collection of excellent tutorials and resources for effectively using gradients. Some of the tutorials and resources are specific to Photoshop and Illustrator, and others are general. Regardless of whether you use gradients every day or if you’ve never used a gradient, there should be something here for you.
Published May 18th, 2008 in Tools
Almost every blogger now is using FeedBurner to publish their feed. The most obvious benefits of using FeedBurner are the statistics and the subscriber count, but there are plenty of other free options that you can use or customize to enhance your blog. One of these options is called BuzzBoost, and essentially it republishes your feed as HTML so that it can be used anywhere.
Published May 5th, 2008 in Tools
Having your website go down is not only frustrating to you, it can also be an inconvenience for your visitors and customers. Most of us aren’t on our sites all day long in order to know when it is down and how often it happens. Fortunately there are a number of tools and online services to accomplish this task for you. There are some basic free tools that will get the job done for most of us who simply want to know the status of our website. However, there are also much more advanced services for larger companies that may want to track downtime for all of their systems. We’ll take a look at several of the options.
AlertSite
Published April 9th, 2008 in Tools
Sitemaps are a great tool for both web designers and visitors. Of course, there are two different types of sitemaps, 1) XML sitemaps (also known as Google sitemaps) and 2) HTML sitemaps. Each type serves its own purpose.
An HTML sitemap can be used effectively to increase the usability of a website by providing a page that links out to every page on the site (or at least to the major pages, depending on the size of the site). Navigation is of course one of the most important aspects to creating a user-friendly site, and when visitors aren’t able to easily find what they are looking for, many will turn to a sitemap. As a result, the HTML sitemap can help to keep visitors on your site by showing them where to find specific information. Additionally, because the sitemap links to all of the other pages on the website, they can be helpful to search engine spiders as they are crawling through the site.
Published February 17th, 2008 in Tools
Web designers, especially those who work from home, need to have a system in place to back up their hard drive on a regular basis. Unfortunately, this typically becomes a priority only after a disastrous loss of data has already occurred.
There are a number of methods to go about backing up a hard drive, and there are almost countless online services that can help you with this task. Some are free and others charge on a monthly or yearly basis. Personally, I would stay away from free services. If your data is important enough to backup continually, isn’t it worth paying a few dollars a month for a better service and peace of mind?
In this article we’ll take a quick look at some of the leading options for backing up your hard drive online, as well as link out to a few tutorials for doing things on your own. Many of the services listed here are extremely similar. Most offer automatic backups at time intervals that you can set and adjust. Free trial offers are very common, and they have been listed here whenever possible. Some of the free trials don’t even require you to enter any credit card information until after the trial period is over. In a few cases, I could not find prices on their website, which makes me a bit leery. The services and prices are most likely competitive, but with so many other options available, I doubt I would ever sign up for a free trial of a service not knowing what the full service will cost on an ongoing basis.
Published February 7th, 2008 in Tools
Earlier this week I posted a gallery of colorful websites. Today I’d like to take a look at a few online tools that can help you to generate a color scheme for your website by taking the colors from a photograph. When designing a new website, color inspiration can come from just about anywhere. Photographs can often be an effective source of color inspiration, and if you find this to be the case for your designs, there are some tools that can help even more.
Published December 20th, 2007 in Tools
If you are planning to start a new website and buy a domain name you will probably need to do some research on any domains that you are considering. This article does not focus on finding the right domain name, but rather the research that should be done once you’ve found a domain that you want to use.
The domain name that you purchase may or may not have a history, and that is what you need to know about. It’s possible that the domain has been penalized by Google or other search engines for the practices of previous owners, which is certainly something that you will want to avoid. A domain with a negative history can carry over when you start hosting your site on that domain.
