Free Webmaster Tools that Need To Know About

By Bruce Hearder


If money is a bit tight, or you are just starting out, then making full use of tools freely available on the web is a MUST.

There are plenty of FREE tools out there, you just have know where to look.
Overture's Keyword Selector Tool ( Visit inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion )

One of the first things you need to do with every online project is to find out how many people are searching for that topic. Overture, now owned by yahoo, gives us this great little tool that shows how many people searched for a particular topic in the previous 30 days, as well as what keywords they used to do that search..

A site well worth book marking.

Blogger - Google Own Blogging Service ( http://www.blogger.com )

Blogger is very easy to use, and if used the correct way can be a great way to get newly developed sites indexed by the search engines.

You can setup as many blogs as you wish post as often as you wish, and say almost anything you want.

Web Site Code checker ( http://validator.w3.org )

These days it’s very easy to quickly put up a website using your favorite WYSIWYG HTML editor, but sometimes they can generate absolutely nasty web code, that can make search engines almost choke just trying to read your site.

Just because internet explorer displays the site OK, doesn’t mean that the search engines can read your site properly.

So make sure every HTML page you put up on the web is 100%b HTML clean and correct.
Not only will the search engines love you, but so will your bank balance.

Steve's Templates - Free Web Templates ( http://www.steves-templates.com )

Steve’s templates provide a whole suite of free web templates that you can import into your HTML editor and edit to fir your website. The template found here are very professional and they cover both personal and business style templates.

SEOPEN.com ( http://www.seopen.com ) This site is a platform for free search engine optimization tools. It also offers a great little FIREFOX plug-in that allows you to access all the SEO Tools on the site, simply by right clicking on your mouse whilst using FIREFOX.

It allows you to find all sorts of information about a site, such as: -WHOIS Information -How many back links the site has -The Keyword Density on the Page -Page Size Checker -HTML validator (uses validator.w3.org see above) -Check a sites robots.txt

Plus a lot more… If you use FireFox then get this plug-in, I can’t live without it any more.

If you don’t use FIREFOX then go to http://www.mozilla.com/ and start using it… It’s the BEST!!

Open Office ( http://www.OpenOffice.org )

Let me quote directly from their website "OpenOffice.org is a multiplatform and multilingual office suite and an open-source project. Compatible with all other major office suites, the product is free to download, use, and distribute." Basically Open Office is a FREE alternative to Microsoft Office. It can read and write most if not all the standard Office files.

The aspect I like about it is that its built in wordprocessor (write) can load Microsoft Word documents and then you can save them as standard PDF documents.

This means that you can create your own e-books and reports without having to buy expensive PDF creators. Give it a go… It’s well worth while.

All of the tools I mentioned above are absolutely FREE.

I use almost all of them on a daily basis, so don’t waste your hard earned money on expensive tools, use these FREE one.

Bruce Hearder owns and run http://www.WebsiteSecrets101.com
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Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Bruce_Hearder

Open Source Web Design

By: James Morris
Every once in a while I run across a site that makes me say, "WOW, what a useful resource!" Open Source Web Design (OSWD) is one of those sites.

As you can probably tell by the articles I've featured on MyWebResource, I'm a strong advocate for using templates to streamline website development. As a designer, I produce free templates to give back to the Internet community, and I really enjoy doing so, but occassionally, the idea machine comes to a screeching halt. That's where sites like OSWD prove to be invaluable.

I found OSWD by chance one day when I was searching the net for template sites. I was looking for some fresh ideas to help me get out of a slump I was sliding into. You can only do the standard 3 column layout so many times before you really get bored.

When I started browsing the OSWD directory of templates, I was impressed with the overall layout and design of the site, but was a little disappointed in the lack of features. I quickly got over my disappointment after looking at a couple hundred of some of the best website designs I've laid eyes upon. I consider myself a reasonably good designer, but many of the designs at OSWD really stand out from the crowd.

What impressed me more than anything else about OSWD and the hundreds of templates you'll find there is that most of the designs are, at minimum, W3C XHTML 1.0 Transitional and CSS 2.0 compliant. Many are XHTML Strict! In the years that I've been on the web and browsed thousands of template sites, I can tell you from experience, to offer so many high quality, standards compliant templates is rare, very rare!

I like the OSWD site and community so much, I've even started working on traditional "static" designs again after spending the last two years doing XOOPS themes almost exclusively.

To the Administrator and community of OSWD, my hat is off to you. You've produced a resource that is by far one of my favorites, and I strongly feel that every webmaster should have your site bookmarked. If for no other reason than to keep their finger on the pulse of what is new and hot in standards compliant design.

Article Source: http://www.articledashboard.com.


James Morris is the Co-Owner and Webmaster of MyWebResource, A comprehensive resource site for webmasters, including webmaster articles, webmaster tools, free downloads, and more.