Using non-standard fonts

3point7designs.com has an interesting article titled “8 fonts you probably don’t us but should’ which addresses the age old problem of having to use fonts that are guaranteed to be on the visitor’s computer. If you are willing to take the risk that a few of your visitors might not see it exactly as intended, have a look at this article. Each font reviewed includes stats on what percentage of computers have it.
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Free SEO Content Management System

This is a freeware search engine optimized content management system.  What that means in a a nutshell is that it’s software you can use it to build a website from a database. The key benefit is that it’s a very quick way to generate a large number of pages and also very easy to change your whole site in a minute or so.

They claim that their templates are highly SEO compliant and more importantly, all use CSS.

It even has advanced options to enable PayPal for an e-commerce site and code generators to create CSS tables from spreadsheets, thumbnail photo albums, and lots more.

Some features (from the website):

• 90% quicker than WYSIWYG editors.
• Optimized hand code quality pages.
• Instantly apply wide range of FREE template designs
• Reliable, hacker free pages.
• FREE code generators. Table, photo albums etc.
• Safe mode for beginners; full html access for experts.
• All menus, SEO, accessibility tags built automatically.
• Unlimited number of sites from one install.
• Preview website before release.
• Content 100% separate from design.

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Glossy image treatment using Javascript

This Javascript automatically adds the glossy effect and rounded corners to any images.
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Convert any file format

This is site is useful to more than just web developers, it’s very popular so forgive me if you know about it already, it’s just too useful not to mention as everyone should know about it.

Upload a file of up to 100GB and Zamzar will convert your file from an to your choice of about 550 file formats. (text, pdfs, video, audio, images, you name it)

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Another site like it is media-convert

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Colour palette combinations

If you are looking for inspiration when trying to pick a colour palette, this site has about 50 examples of colour palettes with a sample design using those colours.
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Add decorative borders to images using CSS

If you want to add decorative borders to your images but don’t want to edit each one inPhotoshop, webdesignwall.com has a great tutorial that shows you how to do it using css to overlay a border on your image. The great thing about this technique is that if you ever want to change the style of your border, just swap out the border image and you’re done. Your original images are in tact.

The tutorial takes it even further and shows you how to implement advanced interactive effects such as overlaid text pop-ups, overlaid icons and  much more. This technique purportedly works on most browsers.

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Text link calculator

If you are interested in selling a text ad on your site but don’t know what to charge, try this pricing tool for a start.

It uses some kind of algorithm which takes things such as back links, page rank, website traffic and more in to account. It’s certainly useful as a baseline and when I tested it on one of my sites it came up with a number very close to an unsolicited offer I had recently received. (perhaps they used this tool to come up with their offer)

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Compare Fonts

This webtool allows you to compare various fonts in up to three columns. You can change the font, size, leading, tracking, alignment, spacing, color, background, the sample text itself and much more.

Sometimes it’s the subtle changes that make all the difference; trying out a single font with 3 different leading or tracking settings is a breeze with this webtool, no need to change parameters and then hit undo/redo to judge.

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Keyword Density

If you have a website about hand made watches but it doesn’t show up in Google when you search for “hand made watches” you may want to check your keyword density of your web page.

If Google can’t figure out what your page is about it will be hard to get it to rank highly.

Here’s a keyword density tool to check your website.

You may want to make adjustments to ensure that the most relevant and important keyword words and phrases show up at the top of the list.

Tip:

The keywords don’t have to be in the main body text, even placing them in the image ‘alt’ tag will help.

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