*** From the Archives ***

This article is from July 30, 2009, and is no longer current.

Free For All: Free for Web Designers

Free for All is twice-monthly for the summer, which gives me the opportunity to do more specialized installments. This time around, you’ll get resources and tools especially for Web designers. If that’s not your thing, browse past columns — there’s plenty to please everyone!
All-In-One Web Elements Design Kit
Do you start your Web design in Photoshop? Then let this massive kit of 17 Photoshop PSD documents and more than 100 buttons, tabs, boxes, scrollbars, and other Web user interface elements take some of the initial development out of the equation.

Your Site: Analytics and Info Starter Kit
Understanding who your visitors are, where they come from, from where they entered your site, and where they left it are critical pieces of information for anyone using a Web site for ecommerce, branding, or any serious endeavor. Equally as important is knowing when your sites go down and what information the rest of the Web has, and passes along, about your sites. That’s why you need the powerful, reliable, and free tracking and analysis tools in this starter kit.
First, you need site analytics: the who, what, when, where, and how of all your site’s traffic and visitors. Google Analytics is the best, most feature-rich such system you can get for free, and it’s easy to implement. However, Google Analytics is browser-based, and some Webmasters prefer to access analytics data via a desktop application. Enter Polaris, the Google Analytics desktop reporting application. It’s a rich Internet application built on Adobe AIR.

In addition to analytics, you need a reliable alert system to tell you when a site has gone down. I like BasicState.com, a free service that polls an unlimited number of sites every 15 minutes for server and network failures. If BasicState.com finds that your site is down, it instantly alerts you via email or SMS.

Now that you know how visitors interact with your site and when the site’s down, it’s time to discover what the world has to say about your site. Quarkbase (no relation to Quark or QuarkXPress) is the ultimate Web site information tool. It tells you a site’s language; technology or framework; blog platform (if applicable); Whois information; IANA network info; contacts; inbound links; number of mentions on social media such as Delicious and Twitter; RSS feed links; Alexa traffic rank and reach; and much more.

Icons for RSS Feeds, Twitter, and General Web UI
It’s tough to design effective Web icons. They must be interesting, informative, and unambiguously communicate a function — all in a space as small as 12×12 pixels. Fortunately, many kind souls share their icon designs gratis. Here are a few to get you started (click images to visit download pages).






Compress Your CSS
Web designers often structure CSS files with indents, spacing, and comments to make it easier to edit the code later. Unfortunately, all those organizational tricks that improve human readability increase CSS file size and load time. And even in a world where broadband rules, load time is always an issue.
When you reduce the load time of your pages, you reduce server overhead costs and the likelihood that visitors will time out or click away from your site while waiting for it to load. For maximum manageability and performance, maintain two copies of your CSS file: one for editing, and a second compressed version without indentation, spacing, or comments to actually run a site. IcyBoard’s Web-based CSS Compressor makes short work of compressing a CSS file for optimal performance and load time.

Spellcheck Your Website
Don’t let typos ruin your Web site. Run it through Spellr.Us, the Web site spell checker. The free trial account is limited to 30 days of service, which includes checking of up to 100 pages during five separate scans. If you need more, check out the half-a-dozen prepaid and monthly fee accounts.

What can I find free for you? Want more free fonts? More Photoshop brushes? How about more online applications that do this or that for free? Tell me in the Comments what you’d like to see in future installments of Free for All, and I’ll do my best bloodhound impression to track it down for you.
Please note: Free for All will often link to resources hosted on external Web sites outside of the control of CreativePro.com. At any time those Web sites may close down, change their site or permalink structures, remove content, or take other actions that may render one or more of the above links invalid. As such neither Pariah S. Burke nor CreativePro.com can guarantee the availability of the third-party resources linked to in Free for All.

Pariah S. Burke is the author of many books and articles that empower, inform, and connect creative professionals.
  • Anonymous says:

    Hi,

    Just dropped by for a visit from basicstate, and figured you might like to learn about another tool at newsreports.org

    The easiest explanation is this screen shot

  • Anonymous says:

    (edit, sorry buggered up the link)

    Hi,

    Just dropped by for a visit from basicstate, and figured you might like to learn about another tool at newsreports.org

    The easiest explanation is this screen shot

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