Website Tools
A custom-designed and developed website is critical for business. A trained professional can help you optimize your site for good search engine rankings, custom-tailor the look and feel to appeal to your target audience, reinforce your company's image and ensure that your content is easily accessible and the user experience enjoyable. However, large web-development budgets often just aren't possible, particularly for small businesses or entrepreneurs who are just getting started. In these cases, a number of web services exist to allow you to grow your company's presence online, often in just minutes. Some of the most popular website builders and resources are featured below.
Website Builders:
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Every business needs a website. The internet is the first place most consumers and potential customers will look for, find and learn about your company, products and services. Creating and maintaining your site with a website builder is simple, easy and cheap. Whether you own a bakery or boarding house, construction company or catering business, using a website builder to launch an online presence will increase awareness of your company's products and services and help boost its bottom line.
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The great thing about creating a website with a website builder is that most applications are user friendly. Site builders typically require no coding, and give you a range of pre-designed templates or themes to pick from to start out. You can then customize the designs to varying degrees, depending on the tool. All you need to do is watch a few tutorials and follow just a few simple steps before you can post your website on the internet. With a website builder, you don't have to hire a designer or programmer. You can create a professional site and stay within your budget. We used Weebly to create this website.
WordPress
WordPress.com
WordPress.com is a hosting platform that makes it easy for anyone to publish online. On WordPress.com the WordPress software is hosted and maintained, letting you focus on creating awesome content! To understand the differences between the hosted and software versions of WordPress, click here.
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WordPress.org
WordPress.org is web software you can use to create a beautiful website or blog. There are thousands of plugins and themes available to transform your site into almost anything you can imagine. Over 60 million people have chosen WordPress to power their websites.
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ZippyKid
ZippyKid provides managed hosting specifically for WordPress sites. Site speed is a critical ingredient for ranking high in search and giving audience instant satisfaction. Zippy Kid is optimized just for WordPress sites like and uses a Content Distribution Network to ensure your content is delivered blazingly fast.
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CodePoet
The Code Poet Directory lists Enterprise-level WordPress professionals, web designers, and developers. So if you’re looking for a WordPress-savvy web design or software development firm, check out the directory for consultants who specialize in building beautiful and efficient WordPress sites.
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Coding & Web Development Courses:
If you are going to try building your own website then it would be worthwhile acquiring the skills required to give your site the best possible start. The online courses below are either free or very affordable and offer step-by-step instruction which you can take at your own pace.
Treehouse
You've got no experience?
No problem! The Treehouse mission is to bring affordable Technology education to people everywhere, in order to help them achieve their dreams and change the world. Learn to build websites, create iPhone and Android apps, code with Ruby on Rails and PHP, or start a business. |
Codeacademy
Codecademy is a team of hackers working hard to build a better way for anyone to teach, and learn, how to code. We're determined to succeed in realizing our mission to turn a world of tech consumers into one of empowered builders. Learn HTML/CSS, JavaScript, Python, Ruby & APIs
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lynda.com
lynda.com is an online training library that provides over 900 courses and 56,000 tutorials on software, web design and development, scripting languages and popular online sites. With constantly growing content, updated weekly and sometimes daily, Lynda offers the training necessary to stay ahead of the curve.
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W3.org - CSS Spec
This the spec for Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), a style sheet language that allows presentation style (fonts and spacing) to be attached to structured documents (HTML files and XML applications). By separating style from the content, CSS simplifies Web authoring and site maintenance.
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Website Templates & Tools:
Best Free Templates
BestFreeTemplates offers you beautiful and professionally designed, high-quality CSS templates absolutely free. All the templates on this website were created by professional designers proving that free templates can be of a similar quality to paid premium ones.
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DivTag Templates
DivTag Templates are creators of Premium Weebly Templates, Plugins, Widgets, Splash Pages and Tutorials which are designed for Weebly users (you!) to deploy, enabling you to have a beautiful and professional looking website, all without having any design or coding background. You won't need to spend hundreds of dollars to create a professionally designed website - DivTag have done the work for you!
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bbPress
bbPress is Forum software, the WordPress way. Easily setup discussion forums inside your WordPress.org powered site. Have you ever been frustrated with forum or bulletin board software that was slow, bloated and always got your server hacked? bbPress is focused on ease of integration, ease of use, web standards and speed. Simple and elegant forum software from the creators of WordPress.
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BuddyPress
BuddyPress is Social Networking, the WordPress way. A WordPress plugin that easily creates a fully featured social network within your WordPress.org powered site. Through this social network you can have profiles for users and forums broken down by topics.
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Online HTML Editor
Use this free online HTML editor to create HTML snippets (or whole HTML pages) for your website.
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Wufoo Forms
Wufoo helps anybody build amazing online forms. When you design a form with Wufoo, it automatically builds the database, backend and scripts needed to make collecting and understanding your data easy, fast and fun. In a few minutes you can build a form and start using it right away.
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pForm
Simple HTML form creator. Create HTML forms in three easy steps.
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vCita
Everything your Small Business needs Online, from initial contact to final payment, vCita provides a solution. Make the most of your website and business with beautiful contact forms, effective client communication, online scheduling, client billing, contact management, email marketing and more.
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Ecwid
Ecwid seamlessly adds an online store to any website, blog or Facebook page in just 5 minutes, integrating with the existing site design. Simply copy and paste - it’s as easy as embedding a YouTube video. Sell on the Web, Facebook, and mobile devices.
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The HelloBar
Direct your visitors and promote your website's most important content with the HelloBar a fully customisable JavaScript solution for building notification bars.
The red bar at the top of this page is an example of the Hello Bar. |
Wistia
The problem with video is that it is hard to measure engagement with traditional analytics that show only pageviews. Wistia fixes that in an elegant way. Host, manage, and track your videos with the best video marketing tools in the (known) universe.
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SlideDeck 2
Build stunning content sliders for your WordPress site without any coding. Add images, text and video, embed your own custom HTML, or even dynamically pull content from your favorite sources, like Instagram, YouTube or RSS feeds.
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Speakpipe
Don't force your customers to type a text message. Let them talk and show them that you are listening. Set up a voicemail widget on your website or add the voicemail application to your Facebook page. Speakpipe allows your customers and visitors to leave voice messages right from a browser. No phone calls are required!
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Olark
Olark makes it easy to add a Web chat function to your site. Quickly design and create an Olark chat box for your site and link it to an instant-messaging program. You can also customize a welcome message and offline notification. When customers click on the box, a message opens in your IM program, where the chat takes place. You can view transcripts on Olark.com and export them to your CRM program.
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Disqus
Disqus is the world’s favourite discussion platform. With a few quick steps, you can upgrade your old comment system with a new way to engage your visitors. No matter what platform you use, Disqus integrates seamlessly with easy-to-use plugins or copy-and-paste code. Disqus is used by some of the largest names across the web. Every month, Disqus reaches over 700 million people.
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Launchrock
Looking to generate some prelaunch excitement for your website, product or business? Create a 'Coming Soon' page for your site on Launchrock where people can sign up and receive email with your launch news and earn incentives for spreading the word via e-mail or on Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, and other websites. Use your LaunchRock dashboard to track a variety of information, including daily sign-ups and page views.
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Qualaroo
Qualaroo helps you uncover the insights needed to better understand user behavior on your website and serve just the right calls to action. When you understand user intent and the issues preventing users from taking a desired action, it becomes much easier to prompt an action that truly improves website conversion performance. Once you implement the Qualaroo code (it generally only takes a couple minutes), you can easily target a question or two as users are making decisions on your website. Your customers will see it slide up from the bottom corner of your site.
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Coding Tools:
Firebug
Firebug integrates with Firefox to put a wealth of web development tools at your fingertips while you browse. You can edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page. Firebug Lite can be used with other browsers.
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Blueprint CSS
Blueprint is a CSS framework, which aims to cut down on your development time. It gives you a solid foundation to build your project on top of, with an easy-to-use grid, sensible typography, useful plugins, and even a stylesheet for printing.
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JQuery UI
jQuery UI is an open source library of UI components (interactions, full-featured widgets, and animation effects) based on the jQuery javascript library. Each component is themeable, making it easy for developers of any skill level to integrate and extend into their own code.
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W3C Validator Suite
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. .The W3C validator suite is a free service by W3C that examines the public pages of an entire Web site and evaluates conformance with W3C open standards and other selected performance measurements. The results are delivered in an easy-to-read integrated report. |
CleanCSS
CleanCSS is a powerful CSS optimizer and formatter. Basically, it takes your CSS code and makes it cleaner and more concise.
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Clean AJAX
Clean is an open source engine for AJAX, that provides a high level interface to work with the AJAX technology.
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Reflection.js
Reflection.js allows you to add reflections to images on your web pages. It uses unobtrusive javascript to keep your code clean.
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Lightbox 2
Lightbox is a simple script used to overlay images on the current page. It’s a snap to setup and works on all modern browsers.
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XHTML Character Entity Reference
This is a reference page containing the 252 allowed entities in HTML 4 and XHTML 1.0, as outlined in section 24 of the official HTML 4 specifications published by the W3C.
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Fire FTP for Firefox
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Site Testing & Management:
Pingdom
Pingdom offers cost-effective and reliable server, network and website monitoring. With a global network of servers to monitor sites 24/7, all year long. The service includes statistics for uptime and response time, and can send out alerts via SMS and email.
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Browsershots
BrowserShots is a web-based browser compatibility check tool that lets you easily preview how your website looks in all popular browsers. No email or registration required, submit your web URL and wait 3-5 min for BrowserShots to generate screenshots for each browser.
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Browsercam
See your web design on any browser on any operating system. Check javascripts, DHTML, forms and other dynamic functionality on any platform. Use the Browsercam bank of testing machines remotely to test how your website performs.
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Are My Sites Up?
AreMySitesUp checks your sites as frequently as every minute. You get unlimited email and SMS notifications when a site is down and are provided with the HTML status error code to let you know what went wrong. Be the first to know when a site is down.
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