Public domain stock photo sources

Websites without images are at a serious disadvantage but not everyone is an artist or a graphic designer. Even if you are, who has the time.

Finding images to compliment the copy on your site is not always easy. Here are a few free and one excellent low cost source of photos and graphics.

Free

Great source of 100% free images

www.morguefile.com

This site searches a number of sources including Flickr. Check the license before you use a photo

http://www.everystockphoto.com

Low cost

Affordable source for stock photos and footage. Enormous selection. If you are a photographer you can submit your photos and share in the profits.

www.istockphoto.com

SEO tool for Firefox

I often neglect to mention some of the best and most valuable tools out there as I imagine that everyone knows about them. I have now created the ‘top tool’ tag for that purpose. The SEO (search engine optimization tool) for Firefox addon (aka plugin) is one of these neglected links. If you have a website and don’t use this, you are missing out.  Install this in Firefox, turn it on by clicking on it in the toolbar (only when doing research as it taxes all the sources unnecessarily otherwise) and discover all kinds of information about websites that show up in searches.

The stats shown in the image above are only a few of those available. It’s probably a good idea to configure the addon to show only the info you are most interested in, for example, only the pagerank, and then when you see a page with a nice pagerank you can click on the ? and get the other stats as you need them.

Features:

(From the site)

• PR: (Google Pagerank) an estimated measure of link authority
• Age: age (Archive.org) shows the first time a page was indexed by Archive.org’s spider. The theory is that if Archive.org found a page so did many of the major search engines.
• Links: (Yahoo! linkdomain) shows an estimate of the total number of links pointing at a domain
• .edu Link: (Yahoo!) shows a rough estimate of the total number of .edu links pointing at a domain
• .edu Page Link:  shows a rough estimate of the total number of .edu links pointing at a specific page
• .gov Link: shows a rough estimate of the total number of .gov links pointing at a domain
• Page Links: (Yahoo! link) shows a rough estimate of the total number of links pointing at a page
• del.icio.us: number of times a URL has been bookmarked on Del.icio.us. Skewed toward techy / Web 2.0 stuff.
• Technorati: an estimate of  total number of links to a site from blogs
• Alexa: rank based on the site’s website traffic. skewed toward Internet marketing and webmaster related resources.
• Cached: (Google site:) shows how many pages from the site are indexed in Google
• dmoz: searches the Google Directory to count the total number of pages from a site that are listed in DMOZ as well as the total number of pages listed in DMOZ that link to that URL.
• Bloglines: shows you how many people are subscribed to a blog on the Bloglines site.
• dir.yahoo.com: Tells you whether a site is listed in the Yahoo! Directory or not.
• WhoIs: An easy link to check the whois data for any site.

Check for broken links

Xenu’s Link Sleuth will check your website for broken links

• Link verification is done on “normal” links, images, frames, plug-ins, backgrounds, local image maps, style sheets, scripts and java applets

Check Web sites for broken links including

• Images
• frames
• plug-ins
• backgrounds
• local image maps
• style sheets
• scripts
• java applets.

Additional features (From the site)

• Simple, no-frills user-interface
• Can re-check broken links (useful for temporary network errors)
• Simple report format, can also be e-mailed
• Executable file smaller than 1MB
• Supports SSL websites (“https:// “)
• Partial testing of ftp and gopher sites
• Detects and reports redirected URLs
• Site Map

Link

Remove the Underline Links on a particular Webpage

Enter the following code into the HEAD section of your web page and the links will no longer be underlined.

<style type=”text/css”>
<!–
A:link {text-decoration:none}
A:visited {text-decoration:none}
–>
</style>

How to create Pullquotes using CSS

Learn how to create pullquotes on your website using CSS.
Download the code for free!
Link

Create a sortable table

This site offers exhaustive instructions and details on how to implement and configure a sortable table.

The good news is that the graceful coding has already been done for you by the talented Brian McAllister, you just have to modify it to your needs.

The table sorts very quickly and can even be sorted via multiple columns.

From the site:

• Plays nicely with the JavaScript global namespace (the script creates and reuses only one JavaScript object)
• Multiple columns can be sorted at once by pressing Shift while selecting the columns using either the keyboard or mouse
• The plug-in architecture makes writing custom sort functions a breeze
• The script can highlight both alternate rows and full columns on a table by table basis.
• Like its predecessor, the script is fully keyboard accessible
• The script can correctly determine a columns datatype should a datatype not be explicitly defined (datatypes determined are limited to numbers, text, currency values and dates)
• The script is smart enough not to sort columns containing identical data

and lot’s more

Link

How to redirect when you move a page, and stay in Google

Instead of using a redirect on the old page, ad the following line of code to your .htaccess file

Redirect 301 /oldpagename.html http://site.com/newpage.html

This is more search engine friendly than a meta or javascript redirect and should help you keep your page in the search engines

Live HTML preview

Enter your HTML code in the top window and watch it appear live in the window below. A great webdesign html scratchpad.

Link

How to create a block-hover effect using CSS

This downloadable code creates that effect where the paragraph you hover over is highlited
Link